🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1536@umvlsi.ecs.umass.edu> breck@umvlsi.ecs.umass.edu (Liam Breck) writes:

   You know the handy system("shell_command_here") call in C that returns
   the command's output as a string?  
No it doesn't.  Perhaps you're thinking of popen(3), which doesn't do
that either.  RTFM. :-)

   Well I need something like that for
   Emacs Lisp...  An Emacs function that will execute a a shell command
   and return it's output (a short string) which will be bound to a
   variable.

   I have tried to find such a thing in Info and by Apropos with every
   keyword I could think of (shell, process, exec, system, call, command,
   etc.) so if I've missed something, I apologize, but please don't tell
   me to RTFM.

I don't think it's there.  Try this one:

(defun shell-command-to-string (cmd)
  "Run string COMMAND in an inferior shell.  Return the output as a string."
  (let ((buf (get-buffer-create " *shell-command-to-string temp*")))
    (unwind-protect
        (progn
          (set-buffer buf)
          (erase-buffer)
          (call-process "sh" nil buf nil "-c" cmd)
          (prog1
              (buffer-string)
            (kill-buffer buf)))
      (kill-buffer buf)
      nil)))

Improvements or alternatives welcome.