running shell commands with gnu clisp

Question

I\'m trying to create a \"system\" command for clisp that works like this

(setq result (system \"pwd\"))

;;now result is equal to /my/path/here

Answer 1

Per the CLISP documentation on run-program, the :output argument should be one of

• :terminal - writes to the terminal
• :stream - creates and returns an input stream from which you can read
• a pathname designator - writes to the designated file
• nil - ignores the output

If you're looking to collect the output into a string, you'll have to use a read-write copying loop to transfer the data from the returned stream to a string. You already have with-output-to-string in play, per Rainer's suggestion, but instead of providing that output stream to run-program, you'll need to write to it yourself, copying the data from the input stream returned by run-program.