saving the o/p of system() in a string

[creeping death]

the system() function executes an OS command . it returns 0 if command is executed else it returns some integer.

as an example :

#include <stdlib.h>

int main()
{
  system("date");
}

this gives me the date on execution.
how do i save the string generated by date command into a character array variable(like char buf[50])?

the only thing that i could think of so far is to redirect the stream, to a file at OS level and then open that file and read from it.

like this

#include <stdlib.h>
#include<stdio.h>

int main()
{
  system("date >f1");
  FILE *fp;
  char ch;
  fp=fopen("f1","r");
  while((ch=fgetc(fp))!=EOF)
  {
     printf("%c",ch);
   }
   fclose(fp);
   remove("f1");
}

this obviously is pretty lame.
i would want to redirect the output(not the return variable) to a string(char array) variable directly....I want to use C ... instead of using OS