Shell output directed to program (HELP)

[John R. Rosenberg]

I am a (very) novice C programmer. I would like to 
write a simple screen manager using curses to
keep a copy of about 5 screens that can be scrolled up
and down in order to, in effect, add screen memory
to a terminal. I need to know if there is a way
to pass strings input to this program to the shell
for execution (such as pwd or cd etc.) and have
the resulting output from the shell directed back
to the program so that it can be addeed to the screen
memory.

Any help would be appreciated.

John Rosenberg
ihnp4!ihu1m!johnnyr