Capturing system command output as a string

Programmer Question

Perl and PHP do this with backticks. For example:

$output = `ls`;

This code returns a directory listing into the variable $output. A similar function, system("ls"), returns the operating system return code for the given command. I'm talking about a variant that returns whatever the command prints to stdout. (There are better ways to get the list of files in a directory; the example code is an example of this concept.)

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".)

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