title: Making a system call that returns the stdout output as a string
body: <p>Perl and PHP do this with backticks. For example,</p>
  
  <pre><code>$output = `ls`;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Returns a directory listing. A similar function, <code>system("foo")</code>, returns the operating system return code for the given command foo. I'm talking about a variant that returns whatever foo prints to stdout.</p>
  
  <p>How do other languages do this? Is there a canonical name for this function? (I'm going with "backtick"; though maybe I could coin "syslurp".)</p>