Thread: Incorporate an existing program into another?

  1. #1
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    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.

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

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    Can popen() handle an interactive program?

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    Quote Originally Posted by thetinman View Post
    Can popen() handle an interactive program?
    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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  5. #5
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    popen() won't work on Win32 programs. Instead use CreateProcess() with inherited STDIN, STDERR and STDOUT handles. There is an example on MSDN.

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    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.

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