Making a system call that returns the stdout output as a string

Question

Perl and PHP do this with backticks. For example,

$output = `ls`;

Returns a directory listing. A similar function, system(\"foo\")

Answer 1

In C on Posix conformant systems:

#include  

FILE* stream = popen("/path/to/program", "rw");
fprintf(stream, "foo\n"); /* Use like you would a file stream. */
fclose(stream);