Hi,

I need to issue a system command and parse the output in my program. This program will actually be runtime libraries for Windows, UNIX and Linux. On UNIX/Linux I used popen to run the command and get the output, for windows I used _popen. However _popen works as a windows console application, but fails to read the output of the command in a dll.

Does anyone know another way to issue commands and get output back in widnows? Thanks.

The _popen() is what should be used on windows, there isn't much else you can do.
On windows this function takes the command string and gives it to the cmd.exe program to execute so the syntax of your command string must be correct for this shell language, i.e. a unix style 'sh' script will not work here.

You could also look at ShellExecute() which is a slightly lower level function that bypasses cmd.exe and does similar funciton on windows.

It's a pain in the butt, but several years ago I had success with this MSDN article:

"How to spawn console processes with redirected standard handles":
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;190351

Man that MSDN article is brutal! Tried it several years ago too
and I couldn't get it to work very well.
I just thought of another idea, in Windows the CreateNamedPipe()
method works great. Its about the only way I know of
besides sockets that works really well in windows for streaming
data between processes.
Since windows stdio is so poorly implemented, I've always
resorted to creating cross-platform libraries that implemented
it different ways depending on where it was compiled.
On windows I used the named pipes, and on Unix used the
stdio interfaces to do the same work. Painful, for sure.

Thanks for the replies guys, I found the solution to my problem.

luckly my dll will only run as console application, as soon as I changed the project setting to use "multithreaded dll" during linking (/MD option in the Project Options) _popen works.

Thanks again.

You aren't calling _popen in DllMain(), are you? That would be Bad...

no, I am not