I'm writing a program and im wanting to call say wget with the c++ command system();

calling system("wget URL_GOES_HERE") for example will pause my program while that is executing. It isn't a problem for small files, but for bug ones its pestering. How can I make it so that the system() command will run in the background while other things in my program execute? Or is this even possible?

Well, I'm a C programmer who looks down on object orientation. ;-) But its all basically the same. There are a number of ways to get a program to do something while the rest of the program does other things. I assume you want the system to be downloading webpages...thats what wget does right?, while your program does whatever. Easiest way to do this, is probably with the "fork()" function. Use the man pages to look it up, but basically you call fork somewhere and it creates a copy of the program in memory, it doesn't share memory with the original program, and then both processes are scheduled to run, so your program and your child process that you spawned to run wget can both run concurrently.

fork basically returns either the process id of the child process you spawned(the one running wget shortly after) or it returns 0 meaning, that its returning to the child process itself. Isn't that nifty? So its like your program literally splits in half and you can do a simple
if(!fork())
{
wget...
exit(0);
}
and its ...wow...indescribably nifty. I hope I helped you.

Thank you very much: This opens up a whole new world of possibility for me. (Gonna try it as soon as i read up a bit on it and stuff)

Actually, i'm not wanting to use wget or wanting to download webpages (well, kinda i am, though not using wget). I want my program to download and parse a local copy of my Streamload account (obtained from XML files) while viewing what has been obtained so far. The program will be a much-needed linux Streamload interface program.

I dubbed it the name "Streamload Highlevel Integrated Terminal" of course, you can imagine what the acronym is. heh, intentional of course.

Just run wget in the background, like so: system("wget URL_GOES_HERE&").