Call a terminal command in a C++ app

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Level 2

155 points

Call a terminal command in a C++ app

Dumb question of the day...

So I opened XCode and made a C++ project and got my terminal window to output "Hello, World!" Impressive right! Anyway what I really want to do is to call commands in the terminal window from my C++ app.

An example would be to "ls |grep" something into a list for further processing to use in another terminal command like "ditto" or something.

Can anyone point me in the right direction.

Thanks!!

Dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5, Mac OS X (10.4.4), Full network of 30+ Macs.

Posted on Mar 2, 2006 2:58 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 2, 2006 4:07 PM in response to Paul Wayne

in C you call system(), like this:
system("ls");

Of course, you can use a string array to build an arbitrary command.

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Answer 2

Finlay

Level 4

2,415 points

Mar 3, 2006 3:26 AM in response to Keith Barkley

If you need to get at the output of the command, you might want to look at the popen() function ("man popen" in the Terminal).

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