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

Clozure Common Lisp:

(with-output-to-string (stream)
   (run-program "ls" '("-l") :output stream))

LispWorks

(with-output-to-string (*standard-output*)
  (sys:call-system-showing-output "ls -l" :prefix "" :show-cmd nil))