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Asked: 2026-05-24T23:22:07+00:00

I need to unzip a file while running a C++ program (as described in

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I need to unzip a file while running a C++ program (as described in Waiting for unzip to finish before carrying on C++ code on a RedHat machine)

To do this I currently do something like this:

system("unzip /usr/bin/File/ZippedFile.gz -d /usr/bin/File/)

Which unzips “/usr/bin/File/ZippedFile.gz” to “/usr/bin/File/ZippedFile” with no problems.

This works fine. However I have noticed that many people seem to say that using

system()

is taboo.

People don’t seem to like it as due to security and system resources (as discussed here: http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/articles/11153/).

But as I want the program to wait until the unzip is complete, is there a viable alternative?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can use plain zlib, or the boost::iostream gzip facility.

    System isn’t wrong per se, but you could also write a replacement for it which doesn’t use the shell with fork, exec, wait and mkstemp. This is cumbersome though. Using boost::gzip_decompressor is the best C++ option to me if you decompress single files. Forking and friends may be better if you need to unzip a directory. Be sure to read about mkstemp.

    For a crash course on fork and exec family: http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/ForkExecProcesses.html

    For an example of using wait for your child to terminate: http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/sasc/doc/lr2/wait.htm

    For reference about creating a temporary directory: http://www.gnu.org/s/hello/manual/libc/Temporary-Files.html

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