Idiomatic alternative to C's `system` function in Zig

Question

Is there a way to make a system call in Zig, other than using a cImport? right now I've got it to work with something like that:

const c = @cImport({
    @cInclude("stdlib.h");
});

// ...

const result: c_int = c.system(cmd);

While this works fine, I'd like to do it "the zig way", without having to import stuff from C.

Answer 1

The alternative to using C's system() function is to use ChildProcess in Zig:

const std = @import("std");

pub fn main() !void {
    var gpa = std.heap.GeneralPurposeAllocator(.{}){};
    defer std.debug.assert(gpa.deinit() == .ok);
    const allocator = gpa.allocator();

    const result = try std.ChildProcess.exec(.{
        .allocator = allocator,
        .argv = &[_][]const u8{ "date" },
    });
    defer {
        allocator.free(result.stdout);
        allocator.free(result.stderr);
    }

    std.log.info("stdout: {s}", .{ result.stdout });
    std.log.info("stderr: {s}", .{ result.stderr });
}

This prints:

$ zig build run
info: stdout: Tue, Aug  8, 2023  1:45:02 PM

info: stderr: