CMake's execute_process and arbitrary shell scripts

Question

CMake\'s execute_process command seems to only let you, well, execute a process - not an arbitrary line you could feed a command shell. The thing is, I want to

Answer 1

1. execute_process command seems to only let you, well, execute a process - not an arbitrary line you could feed a command shell.

Yes, exactly this is written in documentation for that command:

All arguments are passed VERBATIM to the child process. No intermediate shell is used, so shell operators such as > are treated as normal arguments.

2. I want to use pipes

Different COMMAND within same execute_process invocation are actually piped:

Runs the given sequence of one or more commands with the standard output of each process piped to the standard input of the next.

3. file descriptor redirection, etc. - and that does not seem to be possible.

For complex things just prepare separate shell script and run it using execute_process. You can pass variables from CMake to this script using its parameters, or with prelimiary configure_file.