Opening up Microsoft Word in my C++ program - c++

Question

As the title mentions, I am trying to open Microsoft Word through this program and am running into a little bit of difficulty. Having done some research into processes, I decided to go through the route of working with Process ID's and the Fork function to handle opening another file within my program. The area where I seem to be running into some difficulty are with the exec family functions. Their seems to be a variety of different uses for these functions, but I am having a difficult time wrapping my head around which function I should use and whether I am syntatically laying out my arguments correctly.
My console prints the following out to the screen when I type "msword":
Hello ---, what application would you like to open?
msword
Creating Child Process To Open Microsoft Word
parent process
Opening Microsoft Word
#include <stdio.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
// Routine Headers
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
using namespace std;
//function that actually processes loading the program, will take the result of searchApplication
void loadApplication(string path)
{
// If the user typs Microsoft Word (msword abbreviation...)
if(path == "msword")
{
cout << "Creating Child Process To Open Microsoft Word\n";
pid_t ProcessID = fork();
if(ProcessID == -1)
{
cout << "Error creating another Process... Exiting\n";
exit(1);
}
// This is the child process
else if (ProcessID == 0)
{
execle("/Applications/Microsoft Office 2011", nullptr);
}
// This is the parent process
else
{
cout << "parent process\n";
}
}
int main()
{
cout << "Hello ---, what application would you like to open?\n";
string input;
cin >> input;
loadApplication(input);
return 0;
}

Answer 1

You don't have to use fork/exec for this. Just pass the open command to system():
#include <cstdlib>
int main() {
system("open /Applications/App\\ Store.app");
return 0;
}
Note that you will need to escape any spaces in the application name (as shown above), and specify the full name (not just the displayed name).
Here's a very closely related question.