How to execute a command and get return code stdout and stderr of command in C++

Question

Given the following answer (first c++11 answer):

How to execute a command and get output of command within C++ using POSIX?

Here is the implementation for your convinience:

#include <cstdio>
#include <iostream>
#include <memory>
#include <stdexcept>
#include <string>
#include <array>

std::string exec(const char* cmd) {
    std::array<char, 128> buffer;
    std::string result;
    std::shared_ptr<FILE> pipe(popen(cmd, "r"), pclose);
    if (!pipe) throw std::runtime_error("popen() failed!");
    while (!feof(pipe.get())) {
        if (fgets(buffer.data(), 128, pipe.get()) != nullptr)
            result += buffer.data();
    }
    return result;
}

This works really nicely to execute a command (e.g. std::string res = exec("ls");) and get the stdout into a string.

But what it does not do is get the command return code (pass/fail integer) or the stderr. Ideally I would like a way to get all three (return code, stdout, stderr).

I would settle for stdout and stderr. I am thinking that I need to add another pipe, but I can't really see how the first pipe is setup to get stdout so I can't think how I would change it to get both.

Any one got any ideas how to do that, or alternative approaches that may work?

update

See my complete example here witht the output:

Start
1 res: /home

2 res: stdout

stderr
3 res: 
End

You can see that 3 res: does not print stderr in the same way that 2 res: stdout does, but stderr is just dumped onto the screen on a seperate line by the process (and not my program).

External Libs

I really don't want to use external libraries like Qt and boost - mostly because I want the portability of it and also many projects that I work on don't use boost. However I will mark up solutions that contain these options as they are valid for other users :)

Complete Solution Using Comments/Answer

Thanks all for your answers / comments, here is the modified solution (and runable):

working-solution

Answer 1

From the man-page of popen:

The pclose() function waits for the associated process to terminate  and returns the exit status of the command as returned by wait4(2).

So, calling pclose() yourself (instead of using std::shared_ptr<>'s destructor-magic) will give you the return code of your process (or block if the process has not terminated).

std::string exec(const char* cmd) {
    std::array<char, 128> buffer;
    std::string result;

    auto pipe = popen(cmd, "r"); // get rid of shared_ptr

    if (!pipe) throw std::runtime_error("popen() failed!");

    while (!feof(pipe)) {
        if (fgets(buffer.data(), 128, pipe) != nullptr)
            result += buffer.data();
    }

    auto rc = pclose(pipe);

    if (rc == EXIT_SUCCESS) { // == 0

    } else if (rc == EXIT_FAILURE) {  // EXIT_FAILURE is not used by all programs, maybe needs some adaptation.

    }
    return result;
}

Getting stderr and stdout with popen(), I'm afraid you'd need to redirect the output of stderr to stdout from the command-line you're passing to popen() by adding 2>&1. This has the inconvinience that both streams are unpredictably mixed.

If you really want to have two distinguished file-descriptors for stderr and stdout, one way to do it is to do the forking yourself and to duplicate the new processes stdout/stderr to two pipes which are accessible from the parent process. (see dup2() and pipe()). I could go into more detail here, but this is quite a tedious way of doing things and much care must be taken. And the internet is full of examples.

Answer 2

There is kind of workaround possible. You may redirect the stderr to stdout by appending "2>&1" to your cmd. Would this suit your needs?

Answer 3

You can get the return code from the pipe by using a custom deleter as such:

#include <cstdio>
#include <iostream>
#include <memory>
#include <string>
#include <array>
#include <utility>

using namespace std;
pair<string, int> exec(const char* cmd) {
    array<char, 128> buffer;
    string result;
    int return_code = -1;
    auto pclose_wrapper = [&return_code](FILE* cmd){ return_code = pclose(cmd); };
    { // scope is important, have to make sure the ptr goes out of scope first
    const unique_ptr<FILE, decltype(pclose_wrapper)> pipe(popen(cmd, "r"), pclose_wrapper);
    if (pipe) {
        while (fgets(buffer.data(), buffer.size(), pipe.get()) != nullptr) {
            result += buffer.data();
        }
    }
    }
    return make_pair(result, return_code);
}

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
    if (argc <= 1) return 0;
    cout << "calling with " << argv[1] << '\n';
    const auto process_ret = exec(argv[1]);
    cout << "captured stdout : " << '\n' << process_ret.first << endl;
    cout << "program exited with status code " << process_ret.second << endl;
    return 0;
}