Get Console output in C/C++

[Kimm]

ok, perhaps this is a very silly question and everyone should know how to do it... but I happen not to :razz:

when I run an application in the console, lets say I run apt-get, It prints information on the screen, and if an error occures it tells me that, I can easily tell that an error occured from inside the application, like so:


int number = 0;

number = system("apt-get <something>");


and thats easy, but what if I wanted to know exactly what the problem was, if I was running apt-get and something unwanted happens, perhaps I want to know exactly what library was missing or perhaps if it is not in the repositores, how would I know that?

I mean, I want the app to be able to know, so that the app knows what to do

[Xerampelinae]

You probably have to look into pipes. Read about the execp and dup functions... sorry I don't have time to go into detail.

[Kimm]

I'm having trubble finding information about those functions, perhaps someone could explain more closely?

[toojays]

What Xerampelinae is talking about, "pipes", is a way your program can hook into the actual text output of a program, not just its return code.

For your app, you could read the output from apt, and interpret any error messages.

Here's a simple example of using popen:/* there is no error checking, this is just an example */

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
FILE * uname;
char os[80];
int lastchar;

uname = popen("uname -o", "r");
lastchar = fread(os, 1, 80, uname);
os[lastchar] = '\0';
printf("Your OS is %s", os);
pclose(uname);
return 0;
}

[Kimm]

yes, thank you, thats great ^^ now I just need to learn GTK+ or wxWidgets to complete my app, not to advanced GUi though so it should work just fine ^^

thank you!! :grin: