Call a C Program within Another and Get the Child's Output in macOS

Question

I have two C programs and am trying to call some child program "child.c" inside of some parent program "parent.c", and capturing the output to stdout from child.c. How would I go about doing this?

I am using macOS.

Here's an example of what parent.c and child.c might look like

parent.c

while (1)

{

    // call the child program

    // capture the output from the child

    if (child_output == some_condition)

    {

        break;

    }

}

child.c

printf("Hello world!")

Thanks for the help.

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Answer 1

Simply use popen() and create a stream object of type FILE * which you can use with fread()/fgets() to get the output from the child program. Reading the manual page should be enough to get you started.

But here is an example

#include <stdio.h>

int
main(void)
{
    FILE *pipe;
    char line[256];
    pipe = popen("ls", "r");
    if (pipe != NULL) {
        while (fgets(line, sizeof line, pipe) != NULL) {
            fprintf(stdout, "%s", line);
        }
        pclose(pipe);
    }
    return 0;
}

Also, read the manual to get an idea of how this actually works.

Call a C Program within Another and Get the Child's Output in macOS

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