How do I get shell output from system()?

Question

I'm calling system() to trigger a command. I can see the output of the command in the Xcode console – but I don't know how to capture it in a string.

I tried setting a string to the system() call itself, but the string was set to 0.

This is the code I wrote:

string node = "/usr/local/bin/node ~/Desktop/chromix-master/script/chromix.js "; string commandStr = node + "url"; char command[1024]; strcpy(command,commandStr.c_str()); system(command);

Specifically, I'm trying to get the URL of the currently focused tab in chrome using smblott's Chromix utility.

you can get this from following links stackoverflow.com/questions/478898/… stackoverflow.com/questions/14393762/… — reegan vijay
– reegan vijay, Commented Dec 4, 2013 at 5:40

Greg Hewgill · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-03 21:30:18Z

1

Instead of using system(), use popen() to open a pipe from which you can read the program output.

FILE *p = popen(command, "r"); // ... use p as a file pclose(p);

answered Dec 3, 2013 at 21:30

Greg Hewgill

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1 Comment

Mike Over a year ago

Great, thanks. Do you think you can point me in the right direction for reading the file into a string?

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