Silent mode.

Hey, I've got a fairly lengthy program that I'm implementing a 'silent mode' option in (i.e when the program is run, it does what it's designed to do without outputting anything to console). The most obvious way I can think of is to set a flag (short int silent) and do an

Code:

if(silent != 0)

before every function that would output text. This isn't preferable as you can imagine, because that would end up being a lot of extra code that I have a feeling could be avoided.. can any of you offer up any suggestions as to how I could do this differently? Thanks in advanced =)

Well if you know when you want it to be "silent" and when you want it not to be then you may want to take a look at freopen() to reassign std output, aka stdout, to something other than the monitor.
Here is the description for freopen:

Code:

FILE *freopen( 
   const char *path,
   const char *mode,
   FILE *stream 
);

Parameters
path 
Path of new file. 
mode 
Type of access permitted. 
stream 
Pointer to FILE structure. 
Return Value
Each of these functions returns a pointer to the newly opened
 file. If an error occurs, the original file is closed and the function 
returns a NULL pointer value.

Remarks
The freopen function closes the file currently associated with 
stream and reassigns stream to the file specified by path. 
_wfreopen is a wide-character version of _freopen; the path and
 mode arguments to _wfreopen are wide-character strings. 
_wfreopen and _freopen behave identically otherwise.

And here is a sample prog that demonstrates its use:

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

void redirectStream(char*, char*, FILE*);
void printStream(char*);

int main(void){

    
    printf("\nCurrently stdout is the monitor. Redirecting stdout.\n");
    //redirect stdout to a file
    
    redirectStream("newStream.txt", "a+", stdout);

    printf("These statements are going to the new stdout\n");
    printf("This will appear in our file newStream.txt\n");
    
    //now we restore stdout and print out our file
    redirectStream("CON", "w", stdout);    
    printf("\nRedirecting stream to monitor. Displaying file contents\n\n");
    printStream("newStream.txt");

    return 0;
}
void redirectStream(char* fileName, char* mode, FILE* stream){

    freopen(fileName, mode, stream);
}
void printStream(char* fileName){

    char line[80];
    FILE* myFile;
    int i = 1;

    myFile = fopen(fileName, "r");
    if(myFile == NULL){
        printf("Error opening file");
        return;
    }
    while(fgets(line, 80, myFile) != NULL){
        printf("%d. %s", i++, line);
    }

    fclose(myFile);
}