How does Lua execute shell commands?

In Lua, you can use the os.execute function to run shell commands. The os.execute function takes a string parameter that contains the shell command to be executed. The output of the execution will be printed directly to the console. Here is an example:

os.execute("ls -l")

The above example will execute the command ls -l and print the results to the console. It’s important to note that the os.execute function will block the Lua program until the command is finished before continuing with the rest of the code. If you want to get the output of the command, you can use the io.popen function. Here is an example:

local handle = io.popen("ls -l")
local result = handle:read("*a")
handle:close()
print(result)

In the example above, the io.popen function will return a file handle which can be used to read the output of a command. By using handle:read(“*a”), you can read all the content, and then close the file handle with handle:close(). This allows you to save the output of the command to a variable called result, and then print it out using the print function.