is there an easy way to get output of system commands into a string?

Question

Is there an easy way to get output of system commands into a string in C++?

Heres and example of what I mean, trying to get the epoch into a string. It doesnt work of course.

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <string.h>
using namespace std;
int main(){
    string t = system("date +%s");
    cout << "Time " << t << endl;

    return 0;
    }

system returns an integer, 0 for success, -1 for fail. Its not the output of the system command. — j0h, Jan 24 '17 at 22:11
@j0h: it doesn't return only `1` or `0` : https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/277bwbdz.aspx — Raindrop7, Jan 24 '17 at 22:19

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 24 '17 at 22:06

For that specific task you probably want to use time and ctime (or something similar).

For the more general case, see popen (or, on Microsoft compilers, _popen). This doesn't return a string directly; it returns a FILE *, which you can then read like you would a file.

is there an easy way to get output of system commands into a string?

1 Answers1