launch an exe/process with stdin stdout and stderr?

Question

With C++ how do i launch an exe/process with stdin stdout and stderr? I know how to do this in .NET and i remember using popen in the past but popen seems to allow stdin OR stdout not both and not all 3.

I need this for windows but a linux solution is welcome as i'll need it for the same project in the future.

Uuge

Answer 1

You shoud use CreateProcess from WinApi. It takes as argument an object of struct STARTUP_INFO type. You can set hStdin, hStdout, and hStderr fields of the object to redirect those streams of child process to file handles you want (file, pipe, socket...)

Shirberg

Answer 2

A portable solution would be boost.process

(Note: this has been proposed as a Boost library, and released under the same license terms, but not officially accepted. See also Where is Boost.Process?)

Convection

boost process does not implement the Unicode API, only the ANSI API (CreateProcessA), which is a major limitation, making it unsuitable in many cases. – Faucher

Answer 3

I had troubles with spawning processes and reading or writing to their stream, but then I discovered a great C++ library which is very very convenient.

This open-source project is called tiny-process-library and was created by eidheim (a big thanks to him).

A small platform independent library making it simple to create and stop new processes in C++, as well as writing to stdin and reading from stdout and stderr of a new process.

Features

• No external dependencies
• Simple to use
• Platform independent
• Read separately from stout and stderr using anonymous functions
• Write to stdin
• Kill a running process (SIGTERM is supported on Unix-like systems)
• Correctly closes file descriptors/handles

I am sharing this here because I first come to this thread before finding the library several hours later, so I hope it can save some time for further readers.

Penult