How to capture standard output of a shell command in elisp?

Question

I want to run a shell command within Emacs and capture the full output to a variable. Is there a way to do this? For example, I would like to be able to set hello-string to "hello" in the following manner:

(setq hello-string (capture-stdout-of-shell-command "/bin/echo hello")) 

Does the function capture-stdout-of-shell-command exist, and if so what is its real name?

Answer 1

Does shell-command-to-string meet your purpose?
For example:

(shell-command-to-string "/bin/echo hello") 

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I have a suggestion to made that extends Ise Wisteria's answer. Try using something like this:

(setq my_shell_output   (substring      (shell-command-to-string "/bin/echo hello")     0 -1)) 

This should set the string "hello" as the value of my_shell_output, but cleanly. Using (substring) eliminates the trailing \n that tends to occur when emacs calls out to a shell command. It bothers me in emacs running on Windows, and probably occurs on other platforms as well.