popen and system behaves unexpectedly with multiple quoted file paths

I am trying to execute a dos command from within my C++ program, however soon as I add quotes to the output filepath (of a redirection) the command no longer gets executed and returns instantly. I've shown an example below of a path without spaces, but since paths may have spaces and thus be quoted for the shell to understand it properly I need to solve this dilemma - and I'm trying to get the simplest case working first.

i.e.

The following WORKS:

sprintf(exec_cmd,"\"C:/MySQL Server 5.5/bin/mysqldump.exe\" -u%s -p%s %s > C:/backup.bak",user,password,db_name);
system(exec_cmd);

The following does NOT work (notice the quotes around the output):

sprintf(exec_cmd,"\"C:/MySQL Server 5.5/bin/mysqldump.exe\" -u%s -p%s %s > \"C:/backup.bak\"",user,password,db_name);
system(exec_cmd);

I'm guessing it is choking开发者_开发问答 somewhere. I've tried the same "exec_cmd" in popen to no avail.

Any help/advice is greatly appreciated.

I don't think your shell (cmd.exe) allows redirection to a file name with spaces. I couldn't make my command.com from DOS 6.22 accept it (I don't have a cmd.exe nearby to test).

Anyway, you can use the --result-file option to pass the redirection to the command itself.

mysqldump ... --result-file="file name" ...