4tr3r

There's still many ways to control processes created w/system(), but if you're going to use pipes or system() you might as well do it in a scripting language as dev time is much faster and net result is the same. The C++ way to do this, simply said - is to get the apt C++ source code (apt-get source aptitude), locate the relevant functions (in this case one is download_list:: in aptitude/src/download_list.cc), then hardcode the package names you want and call from main(). It's not the only function you need but you can easily find the others in the source.