System (C standard library)

In the C standard library, system is a function used to execute subprocesses and commands, residing in stdlib.h. It differs from the exec/spawn family of functions in that instead of passing arguments to an executed object, a single string is passed to the system shell, typically the POSIX shell, /bin/sh -c.

Prototype

int system(const char *command);

Behaviour

system is blocking; that is, the call will wait until the child process terminates and return its exit value. During this time, SIGCHLD will be blocked as system waits for the child to die; also, SIGINT and SIGQUIT are ignored, so to ensure responsiveness the programmer should check the return value to see if the user is trying to terminate the process. On error, system will return -1 on failure prior to or at fork (e.g. process count limit reached) but will return 127 on failure after fork (e.g. unable to execute sh); this is indistinguishable from the command exiting with status 127.

Under POSIX, system forks and execs /bin/sh with two arguments: "-c" and command. While the behaviour of sh is specified elsewhere, it is instructive to consider that command need not be a single command; it can in fact be a pipeline or even a series of pipelines. For example, consider a program that wishes to display a screenshot:

system ("pngtopnm "My Screenshot.png" | pnmtoxwd )> out.xwd && xwud out.xwd");

This line exhibits an import consideration: since command will be parsed as a shell command line, quotes around e.g. file names must be escaped. This however raises security considerations, since if command is constructed from user-supplied data, an attacker may be able to break out of any quoting and execute an arbitrary command in the context of the parent; indeed, this is almost the canonical code injection exploit. It is thus considered sensible to only employ system on predetermined command strings, using other functions (spawn et al) to pass user-supplied data in argv or passing such data through pipes or temporary files.

The child spawned by system inherits its parent's standard streams; thus the child can receive keyboard input and write to the terminal. Note that this means that the parent will not receive the child's output, except through the use of a redirection or tee.

External links

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