Thread: Beginner's question: how to cin after system()

Hello!

Imagine I want to have my program run a shell script and I want to use its return in my program. Could you please tell me how to read it back into my program?

Thank you!

Also, best practices suggestions are welcome.

I tried this, but the program expects an user input, as you can imagine. (And I think it is because the shell script has already been piped to stdout by the time I am expecting to retrive it, right?)

Code:

#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>

int main() {
    system("cd ~; ls | wc -l");
    int wc;
    std::cin >> wc;
    std::cout << "Wc is " <<  wc;
    return 0;
}

Read up on popen().

there is also an unofficial boost library that lets you do that sort of thing in a more C++-like way.