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

You are asking specifically about clisp. I'll add here that if you are using Clozure CL then you can also easily run os subprocesses.

Some examples:

;;; Capture the output of the "uname" program in a lisp string-stream
;;; and return the generated string (which will contain a trailing
;;; newline.)
? (with-output-to-string (stream)
    (run-program "uname" '("-r") :output stream))
;;; Write a string to *STANDARD-OUTPUT*, the hard way.
? (run-program "cat" () :input (make-string-input-stream "hello") :output t)
;;; Find out that "ls" doesn't expand wildcards.
? (run-program "ls" '("*.lisp") :output t)
;;; Let the shell expand wildcards.
? (run-program "sh" '("-c" "ls *.lisp") :output t)

Do a search for run-program in the CCL docs located here: http://ccl.clozure.com/ccl-documentation.html

There are a couple nice Lisp ways of doing this in this stackoverflow answer: Making a system call that returns the stdout output as a string Once again, Rainer to the rescue. Thanks Ranier.