Ncurses and Linux pipeline

Question

I\'d like to write a simple program using ncurses for displaying some data. I would then like for the program to write to stdout in such a way that I can then use a pipe (|

Answer 1

This is 5 years old now and you've probably moved on, but this was the top of my search results so I thought I'd add the solution I found. After a lot of messing about with trying to get pipes to work in code like bash example above, I finally found someone that hinted in the right direction with the newterm command. The only trick is to open a new tty and to use newterm instead of initscr:

#include  
#include 

int main(int argc, char ** argv) {

  FILE *f = fopen("/dev/tty", "r+");
  SCREEN *screen = newterm(NULL, f, f);
  set_term(screen);

  //this goes to stdout
  fprintf(stdout, "hello\n");
  //this goes to the console
  fprintf(stderr, "some error\n");
  //this goes to display
  mvprintw(0, 0, "hello ncurses");
  refresh();
  getch();
  endwin();

  return 0;
}

With this you can pipe stdout and stderr wherever you want but have an ncurses session. I'm not sure how portable it is or if there are any other catches, just glad to find a solution that worked.