<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>

Perl:
```
```
$output = `foo`;
```
```
ADDED: This is really a multi-way tie.  The above is also valid PHP, and Ruby, for example, uses the same backtick notation as well.