Question

Is it possible to make system call in Objective-C?

I have the following code:

if (!system("ls -l")) {
    NSLog(@"Successfully executed"); 
} else {
      NSLog(@"Error while executing the command"); 
}

How to get the output?

Thanks

Answer 1

This is a perfect candidate for using -[NSFileManager contentsOfDirectoryAtPath:error:] instead of wrapping a built-in shell function and parsing the output. For general-purpose commands where you need the output — and where there is no equivalent functionality “for free” in Cocoa (it just takes time to learn the available APIs) — NSTask is generally a far better alternative than system().