How do I execute external program within C code in linux with arguments?

Question

I want to execute another program within C code.
For example, I want to execute a command

./foo 1 2 3

foo

is the program which exists in the same folder, and

1 2 3

are arguments.

foo

program creates a file which will be used in my code.

How do I do this?

Answer 1

Use system():

int status = system("./foo 1 2 3");

system() will wait for foo to complete execution, then return a status variable which you can use to check e.g. exitcode. man 2 wait on your linux system will list the various macros you can use to examine the status, the most interesting ones would be WIFEXITED and WEXITSTATUS

Alternatively, if you need to read foo's output to stdout, use popen().

How do I execute external program within C code in linux with arguments?

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