Starting DebugView
Simply execute the DebugView program file (dbgview.exe) and DebugView will immediately start capturing debug output. Note that if you wish to capture kernel-mode debug output under Windows NT/2K, you must have the “load driver” privilege.
Menus, hot-keys, or toolbar buttons can be used to clear the window, save the monitored data to a file, search output, and change the window font. In addition, you can toggle on and off capture of kernel or Win32 debug output.
As events are printed to the output, they are tagged with a sequence number. If DebugView’s internal buffers are overflowed during extremely heavy activity, this will be reflected with gaps in the sequence number.
Each time you exit DebugView it remembers the position of the window, the widths of the output columns, the font selection, configured filters, and the time-stamp mode.
Command-line Options
DebugView supports several command-line options that let you modify its behavior when it starts. Several are relevant when starting DebugView as a client on a system that will send debug output across the network to a DebugView instance that displays the output on another computer, and are described in the Remote Monitoring section. However, others modify the behavior of DebugView when you run it to display output, and are useful if you want to execute DebugView from a batch file or logon script and want it to capture debug output as soon as it starts. You can have DebugView display all of its command-line options by using the /? option.
Here are the command-line options supported when you run DebugView in non-client mode:
debugview [/f] [/t] [/l Logfile [/a] [[/m nnn [/w]] | [/n [/x]]] [/h nn]] [Logfile]
The /f option has DebugView skip the filter confirmation dialog when filters were active the previous execution.
The /t option has DebugView launch into the system tray, rather than as a window. This has DebugView capture debug output as soon as it starts while not taking up screen real-estate. DebugView's tray behavior is further described in the Running in the Tray section.
The /l option directs DebugView to begin writing output to the indicated logfile as soon as DebugView executes. The /m option allows you to specify a size limit (in MB) for the log file, and the /a option has DebugView append to the logfile if it already exists, rather than overwrite it and /w has the log file wrap when it reaches the maximum size you specify. The /n switch has DebugView create a new log file, named with the date, each day. If you include /x with /n the display clears when a new log file is created.
Finally, the /h switch controls the history depth, which is the count of most recent output lines shown in the DebugView display. These options correspond to the logfile commands available through menu items when DebugView is running, which are described in Saving and Print.