Question

I want to run a dos command from my program for example “dir” command.
I am doing it like,

system("dir");

Is there any way to read the output of that command directly into a program variable?

We can always redirect the output to a file and then read that file, by doing
system("dir > command.out");

And then reading command.out file. But how can we do it directly rather than redirectling to a file and then reading?

Answer 1

Found an alternate way or rather windows equivalent of popen. It is _popen(). This works just right for me and moreover it’s easy to use.

   char   psBuffer[128];
   FILE   *pPipe;

   if( (pPipe = _popen( "dir", "rt" )) != NULL)
  {
     while(fgets(psBuffer, 128, pPipe))
     {
       printf(psBuffer);
     }
  }

Find the details with full example here.