Question

I am working on building a GUI around a console application. I would like to be able to click a button to run the console app and show the console output inside of the GUI itself. How might I accomplish this? I am working in Linux.

Answer 1

You could also try QProcess. It provides a Qt interface to launching external processes, reading their I/O and waiting, or not, on their completion.

For your purpose, it sounds like you want the process to run asynchronously, so code might look like :

myprocessstarter.h :

#include <QObject>
#include <QProcess>
#include <QDebug>


class MyProcessStarter : public QObject
{
    Q_OBJECT
public:
    MyProcessStarter() : QObject() {};
    void StartProcess();
private slots:
    void readStandardOutput();
private:
    QProcess *myProcess;
};

main.cpp:

#include "myprocessstarter.h"

void MyProcessStarter::StartProcess()
{
    QString program = "dir";
    QStringList arguments;
    // Add any arguments you want to be passed

    myProcess = new QProcess(this);
    connect(myProcess, SIGNAL(readyReadStandardOutput()), this, SLOT(readStandardOutput()));
    myProcess->start(program, arguments);
}

void MyProcessStarter::readStandardOutput()
{
    QByteArray processOutput;
    processOutput = myProcess->readAllStandardOutput();

    qDebug() << "Output was " << QString(processOutput);
}

void main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    MyProcessStarter s;
    s.StartProcess();
}