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

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...)

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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?)