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view standard error of shell script launched via external tools

Posted: Thu Apr 23, 2026 6:24 am
by WolfhartT
Hello,

Is there a way to see, in Oxygen, the standard error (stderr) of a shell script that I launch via external tools? When I launch an XSL script, I see the error messages in a window entitled "Results" that pops up. But nothing similar happens with shell scripts. I read on https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... -view.html that there is a "Console View" in Oxygen, but I cannot find how to access this view. I am using version 22.1.

Thank you in advance for your help!

Re: view standard error of shell script launched via external tools

Posted: Fri Apr 24, 2026 11:20 am
by teo
Hello,

The link you mentioned refers to documentation for our old SVN Client (which is now deprecated), so it is not relevant for your use case.

For running shell scripts via External Tools, you can check the following documentation topics:
- https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... tools.html
- https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... tools.html

In particular, in the "External Tools Preferences" topic, there is a section called "Show output messages" that explains how the output of external processes can be displayed.
Unfortunately, the version of Oxygen you are using is quite old and I cannot verify the accuracy of the information provided, but I hope that all the options mentioned in the topic are available for your version.

I did a quick test by configuring our directory comparison script as an external tool in Oxygen.
I intentionally provided a wrong directory path as the second argument to the script in question, knowing that an error would be automatically reported to "stderr".
Below I present the results displayed in Results view in 2 situations:

Results view ("Show output messages" option selected):

Code: Select all

Started: D:\workspace\github\oxygen\scripts\compareDirs.bat "D:\workspace\blog-main" "D:\workspace\blog-xxx"
NOTE: Picked up JDK_JAVA_OPTIONS: -Djava.security.manager=allow --add-opens=java.base/java.lang=ALL-UNNAMED

ERROR: Directory not found: D:\workspace\blog-xxx
Process ended with exit code: 1

Results view ("Show output messages" option not selected):

Code: Select all

NOTE: Picked up JDK_JAVA_OPTIONS: -Djava.security.manager=allow --add-opens=java.base/java.lang=ALL-UNNAMED
ERROR: Directory not found: D:\workspace\blog-xxx
The conclusion is that error messages emitted on "stderr" are always displayed in the Results view.
Messages emitted on "stdout" are only displayed if the "Show output messages" option is selected.
This should work in your case as well.
If this does not happen, more details are needed to further investigate.

One last observation: the outputs from the "stdout" and "stderr" output streams are not displayed in 2 distinct tabs in the Results view, they are inter-mixed within the same tab.

Regards,
Teo