C++ || Snippet – How To Use Popen & Save Results Into A Character Array

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The following is sample code which demonstrates the use of the “popen” function call on Unix based systems.

The “popen” function call opens a process by creating a pipe, forking, and invoking the shell. It does this by executing the command specified by the incoming string function parameter. It creates a pipe between the calling program and the executed command, and returns a pointer to a stream that can be used to either read from or write to the pipe.

The following example demonstrates how to save the results of the popen command into a char array.

QUICK NOTES:
The highlighted lines are sections of interest to look out for.

The code is heavily commented, so no further insight is necessary. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.

The following is sample output:


Program output: fa97c59cc414e42d4e0e853ddf5b4745 /bin/ls

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