Question

How do I launch a new non-interactive shell process from C?

Currently I have the following:

system(cmdStr);
//system("/bin/sh -c");

The cmdStr is the command I want to execute. I have the reference below to the shell process… but how do I append the cmdStr to it? How do I make it launch a new process?

Answer 1

If you don’t want to concatenate the string, you can do:

if (fork())
{
    execl("/bin/sh", "sh", "-c", cmdStr, (char *) NULL);
    exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}

which is what system basically does.

Otherwise to a concatenate a string, you should have a look to standard functions strcat and strncat from string.h.