in reply to Redirect filtered PPM screen output to a file.

In dos you can redirect all of std{in,out,err} by creating a batch file like

@echo off stty update.txt ppm update stty con
I understand that ppm update does not simply write to stderr, but you could still try if this works.

(This is the only way to redirect error messages to nul in dos as command does not have a redirect operator to redirect stderr.)