Incorporate an existing program into another?

I have a program. It is a .EXE command line program that asks a series of questions. I would like to have the source code, but since I do not, I would like to write a new program that feeds input variables into it and then captures the output. Is this a horribly difficult task to do? How do I go about doing this? Do I need to write a terminal (DOS window) emulator? I would like to do this in C++, although I wonder if C++ might not be the best way to do it.

You can do that using _popen() to create a pipe between your program and the child program.

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Mats

Can popen() handle an interactive program?

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Originally Posted by thetinman

Can popen() handle an interactive program?

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Depends on what you mean by interactive. It can handle stdin & stdout IO. It won't manage for example MS Word.

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Mats

popen() won't work on Win32 programs. Instead use CreateProcess() with inherited STDIN, STDERR and STDOUT handles. There is an example on MSDN.

I'm using MinGW, which seems to have popen(). I have it partially working, but I can't seem to talk, listen, and then talk and listen more to the program that I want to work with. I don't know too much about pipes, stdin, and stdout.