Question

I am attempting to make a program in C which presents a GUI and allows the user to select from a list of applications, which to install on the computer. I can manage the gui, but I’ve never been taught how to actually issue command line commands.
I know with bash its just apt-get install firefox for example, but how do I do such a thing with C? i.e. on click, the program runs ‘apt-get install

The other problem is I’m not familiar with the proper name for this interaction, so it is hard to search.

Thanks for the help

Answer 1

If you use the traditional C standard lib, you can choose from:

• popen() – Opens a process with stdio IO streams to read/write to the process
• system() – Executes a process with same IO streams as parent

or:

• fork() + execl() (or exec variants) which is essentially how system() is implemented.

Try the man pages on all of these.

Also, order “Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment” by W. Richard Stevens