popen on android NDK

Question

Is popen not supported by android NDK?

I read this page and wondering if this is true

The same is possible with POSIX popen() but it is not cu

Answer 1

Indeed, popen() will not work on Android. As GLIBC description states, any UNIX operating system needs a C library to make all system calls. These include threading memory allocation, working with files, etc. Because Android is based on Linux, it needs such library implemented, but because it's a small mobile OS, Google decided to write a "lite version" of libc called bionic. This library does not include popen(), therefore you can't use it. There is a description of bionic library in the NDK documentation which lives inside your NDK directory (for some reason it's not online). Hope this helps.