How do you run terminal shell commands from a xcode c project and get the return results from terminal?

Question

I have been working on a project and am wondering how it is possible to send a terminal command in xcode and display results in a popup. I dont want to use the system(); method because it opens terminal. I know NSTasks can be used, i just dont know how to use it. Thank you everyone! (BTW this is for macosx not ios)

Answer 1

To get the output of a shell command, you need to open a pipe and read the data from it. Here's what I use for this task:

static NSString *outputForShellCommand(NSString *command) {
    FILE *fp;
    char data[1024];

    NSMutableString *finalRet = [[NSMutableString alloc] init];
    fp = popen([command UTF8String], "r");

    if (fp == NULL) {
        [finalRet release];
        return nil;
    }
    while (fgets(data, 1024, fp) != NULL) {
        [finalRet appendString:[NSString stringWithUTF8String:data]];
    }
    if (pclose(fp) != 0) {
        [finalRet release];
        return nil;
    }

    return [NSString stringWithString:finalRet];
}

Also, note that this question has been asked many times before.