Making a system call that returns the stdout output as a string

Perl and PHP do this with backticks. For example,

$output = `ls`;

Returns a directory listing. A similar function, system("foo"), returns the operating system return code for the given command foo. I'm talking about a variant that returns whatever foo prints to stdout.

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".)