5
Calling UNIX Shell Commands from C
Use the system() function to pass control to the shell environment that a C language application is running in. Here is a minimal source script listing that executes a command to list a directory into a temporary file:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
main(void)
{
char command [80];
sprintf(command, “ls /working_dir > /tmp/xxx.txt\n");
system(command);
return(0);
}
Also check out the fork() and exec() function calls in the standard library if you want to create multiple processes running in the background.
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