Question

Is there any way for me to run a system command such as date through my C program and pipe the output to a char *date so I can use it later? I’ve been trying to use the “system” command but doing system(“date”); immediately prints out the date output to stdout. I want to grab this data using system or exec within my program. Any suggestions would be appreciated…

Thanks!

Answer 1

Take a look at popen(). You open a FILE pointer with it, like so:

#include <stdio.h>
FILE *f = popen("date", "r");

And then you can use fread() or fscanf() to read from f into your buffer of choice.