Running a program programmatically through command line

Question

How can I run a program programmaticaly through command line and get its return value? I would like to have a way that works on both Windows 7 and MacOS X, but if I need to program it differently per OS I would do that too

Answer 1

You can use system to call a program and retrieve its return value.

An example would be

int returnValue = system("C:\\SomeProgram.exe");