store linux command in variable

[heidiK]

Hello everyone

I'm trying to use linux command in C++ code to find out the number of lines in a file. Here's the line of code

system("wc -l < 00403.dat");

it works fine but is there any way I can store the result in a variable. E-g if it returns 1000 then I want to store it in an int type of variable.

Thanks

[Athar]

You can, but you'll have to use popen.
And if you just want to count lines, then the following approach is better on at least a dozen different levels:

ifstream is("00403.dat");
string dummy;
int lines=0;
while (getline(is,dummy))lines++;

[heidiK]

Alright

Thanks Athar :-)