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

You can use the popen and pclose functions to pipe to and from processes. The popen() function opens a process by creating a pipe, forking, and invoking the shell. We can use a buffer to read the contents of stdout and keep appending it to a result string and return this string when the processes exit.

example

#include <iostream>
#include <stdexcept>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

string exec(string command) {
   char buffer[128];
   string result = "";

   // Open pipe to file
   FILE* pipe = popen(command.c_str(), "r");
   if (!pipe) {
      return "popen failed!";
   }

   // read till end of process:
   while (!feof(pipe)) {

      // use buffer to read and add to result
      if (fgets(buffer, 128, pipe) != NULL)
         result += buffer;
   }

   pclose(pipe);
   return result;
}

int main() {
   string ls = exec("ls");
   cout << ls;
}

Output

This will give the output −

a.out
hello.cpp
hello.py
hello.o
hydeout
my_file.txt
watch.py