Store output of system(file) command as a string in C

Question

To get the type of file we can execute the command

system(\"file --mime-type -b filename\");

The output displays in to terminal.But could

Answer 1

See the man page of system: It does not return the output of the command executed (but an errorcode or the return value of the command).

What you want is popen. It return a FILE* which you can use to read the output of the command (see popen man page for details).