I am attempting to execute a shell command from inside an iPhone app I am writing. The app is for jail broken devices. I need to catch the stdout of the command to display it in the app. I know that popen is executing the command because xcode's gdb is showing the output. Also the file pointer returned is not null however when I try to read the first character of the stream it immediately reaches the eof. Can anyone tell me how I can read the stdout? Thank you in advance