Question

Can the launchApplcation call be usedv in a non-Cocoa app?
I need the equivalent of Windows spawnl(), which executes a application from within another. Is there an OSX equivalent to spawn() or exec()?

I could use the system() call, but I need to add command line arguments to it.

Thanks!

Bill

Answer 1

You do have the ability to fork and exec other processes.

For example:

int myPipe[2];
int err, child_pid;

err = pipe(&myPipe); //creates the pipe - data written to myPipe[1] can be read from myPipe[0]

child_pid = fork();

if(child_pid == 0)
{
    err = dup2(myPipe[1], 1); //set myprogram's standard output to the input of the pipe

    execl("/path/to/myprogram", "arg1", "arg2");
}

int pipefd = myPipe[0];
char buffer[255];
err read(pipefd, buffer, 255); // etc etc

// Ideally you would check that err and child_pid != -1