Thread: popen with app that never returns

I'm wanting to get the output from an application that never returns

xscreensaver-command -watch

I'm basically wanting my application to sleep for x amount of time if it discovers that the screensaver has kicked in. I'm just curious what effect it might have trying to read the output of an application that never returns and how I would capture its output at various intervals.

Thanks

This more appropriately belongs in the misnamed "Linux programming" forum.

It should be okay to use popen for this. To get the output, you might do a select or poll to see if there's data available for reading on the descriptor.