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

Icon/Unicon:

stream := open("ls", "p")
while line := read(stream) do { 
    # stuff
}

The docs call this a pipe. One of the good things is that it makes the output look like you're just reading a file. It also means you can write to the app's stdin, if you must.