NAME
system —
pass a command to the shell
LIBRARY
Standard C Library (libc, -lc)
SYNOPSIS
#include
<stdlib.h>
int
system(const
char *command);
DESCRIPTION
The
system()
function hands the argument command to the command
interpreter sh(1).
The calling process waits for the shell to finish executing the command,
ignoring SIGINT and SIGQUIT,
and blocking SIGCHLD.
If command is a
NULL pointer,
system()
will return non-zero if the command interpreter
sh(1) is
available, and zero if it is not.
RETURN VALUES
The system() function returns the exit
status of the shell as returned by
waitpid(2), or -1 if an error occurred when invoking
fork(2) or
waitpid(2). A return value of 127 means the execution of the shell
failed.
SEE ALSO
STANDARDS
The system() function conforms to
ISO/IEC 9899:1990 (“ISO C90”)
and is expected to be IEEE Std 1003.2
(“POSIX.2”) compatible.