Re: Shell commands with output to string

[Olivier Dion via General Guile related discussions <guile-user@gnu.org>]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2022, Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de> wrote:
> Hello Guile users!
>
> How would I run a shell command from inside Guile and get its output
> as a string, instead of the output being outputted directly? (Guile
> 3.0.8)

I use the following:

(define-module (shell utils)
  #:use-module (ice-9 format)
  #:use-module (ice-9 popen)
  #:use-module (ice-9 textual-ports))

(define (shell% proc fmt . args)
  (let* ((port (open-input-pipe (format #f "~?" fmt args)))
         (output (proc port)))
    (close-pipe port)
    output))

(define-public (shell . args)
  (apply shell% (cons get-string-all args)))

(define-public (shell$ . args)
  (apply shell% (cons get-line args)))

Then
(shell "ls" "-l")

The $ variant is to get a single line in the output.

-- 
Olivier Dion
Polymtl