Practical Programming in Tcl & Tk, Third Edition

Running Programs with exec

The exec command runs programs from your Tcl script.^[*] For example:

^[*] Unlike other UNIX shell exec commands, the Tcl exec does not replace the current process with the new one. Instead, the Tcl library forks first and executes the program as a child process.

set d [exec date]

The standard output of the program is returned as the value of the exec command. However, if the program writes to its standard error channel or exits with a nonzero status code, then exec raises an error. If you do not care about the exit status, or you use a program that insists on writing to standard error, then you can use catch to mask the errors:

catch {exec program arg arg} result

The exec command supports a full set of I/O redirection ...