I am wanting to start programming some simple applications that I can use as tools and such. I am hoping these applications will allow me to simplify certain terminal processes I use often. They interact with my local files lots as well as other applications (db2 for example). I have started learning C a little bit for this.
I thought I would use C with embedded bash commands. I was wondering if that was the best/most common method of programming these applications? Is there a better way of doing this? Also, I will need to be able to display the terminal output. Will this be possible? My only issue with this method is that it is not very transferable to non Linux operation system.
Any insight or a push in the general direction would be greatly appreciated.
If you want cross-platform, consider Qt or WxWidgets. I’d go with Qt, but that is only because I don’t know WxWidgets 😉
If you want simple things quickly, use Qt with PyQt or PySide (also see this SO question). WxWidgets has Python bindings too, according to it’s webpage. Learning Python is generally fun, useful, and an order of magnitude faster and easier than learning C++.
Forget C for GUI programming, GUIs are inherently object-based, and much easier to work with on languages which support objects naturally.
For child process handling, a quick search for Python and Qt found this example at http://www.qtforum.org.