[fpc-pascal] It is possible to pass command line to pascal

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Rainer Stratmann wrote:
>  On Sunday 30 June 2013 12:32:30 you wrote:
>> Rainer Stratmann wrote:
>>>  On Sunday 30 June 2013 00:59:59 you wrote:
>>>> I Tried, but only return an integer not a string value.
>>> Thats right.
>>>
>>> You have to put the result in a file and then afterwards read the file.
>>>
>>> ls uname -r > file.txt
>> I'm sorry, but that's misleading on at least two accounts. The first is
>> that redirection (> and so on) is a property of the shell, so it won't
>> work unless you pass the entire command to a shell with (typically) the
>> -c option. The second is that as linked by leledumbo earlier
>> http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Executing_External_Programs there are
>> specific facilities in the runtimes to do this sort of thing and they
>> don't, as a rule, involve temporary files.
>>
>> If I had to go on, what's that -r supposed to be doing?
> 
> It is not too difficult to find out.
> 
> If you speed up your engine then you can find out that he wants to know the 
> actual Linux kernel number.
> 
> 'uname -r'

In which case why is he putting ls in front of it? -r is a valid option 
to both uname and ls, so since we're already looking at a broken command 
it's entirely valid to ask which it's supposed to apply to.

> With 'uname -r > file.txt' you redirect the output in a file.
> Then cou can read the file.
> 
> I am sorry, but you try to make a very simple thing complicated.

You might call having to invoke a shell with the -c option to get the 
redirection working, working out where to put the temporary file, 
deleting it on completion and making sure that all error conditions are 
handled "simple". I certainly don't.

But as Marco has already reminded us, the information is already 
available from a standard library call. Calling an external program is 
not something to be approached for a trivial reason, unless you're 
writing shell or in a scripting language such as Perl where it might be 
less trouble than searching CPAN for the appropriate extension module.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

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