[ericshliao]

Originally Posted by hansel

It's called io.popen()

  local f = io.popen("ls -l")        -- runs command
  local buf = f:read("*a")          -- read output of command
  f:close()
  print(buf)

Thanx. I find io.popen() now. I looked for them in the wrong section.

added:
another question:
how do I get the size of buf?

added 2:
I am trying using the length operator #.