Why is redirecting stdout/stderr on android not working?

Question

I downloaded SDL 1.3 and tested it together with OpenGL ES on my android 2.2 device. It works fine but I don't get the outputs from the printf calls. I tried the commands below as mentioned at the android developer page but neither DDMS in Eclipse nor adb logcat reports the strings that the program writes using printf. I made sure to filter for the stdout tag.

$ adb shell stop
$ adb shell setprop log.redirect-stdio true
$ adb shell start

What am I missing or doing wrong?

Answer 1

According to this presentation, log.redirect-stdio is for Dalvik output, to redirect C/C++ output (such as printf), you must install busybox on the device and use its xargs utility like this:

myprogram | xargs log

This obviously works for code that gets called as a standalone executable. If it's only for debugging purposes, you can write a tiny program to call your library and call that from your application using xargs.