ProcessUtils

This class with its supporting classes provides a set of very easy interfaces for running external command-line programs from Java, inspired by the TCL exec facility. It is also similar in use to Perl backtick command execution.

Available information:

• The API documentation is built with links back to the source code.
• A jar archive with both source and binary is also available for download from this site. It should work with JDK1.4 or higher. It is currently available under the LGPL, but may be made available under an Apache-type license in the future. The archive includes a class with a main method that can be used to interactively test ProcessUtils.

Example Usage

A very common form of use of ProcessUtils.exec is to run an external program, passing in command-line arguments and receiving the output back as a string. For example on most Unix-like systems, to receive information about space usage on file systems you can use the "df" command. With ProcesUtils this is:

  String fileStats = 
    ProcessUtils.exec(new String[]{"df"});

With exception handling, the same example could become something more like this:

  String fileStats = null;
  FileSystemInfo record = new FileSystemInfo();
  try {
    fileStats =  ProcessUtils.exec(new String[]{"df"});
    record.parseUnixFileStats(fileStats);
  } catch(ProcessUtils.Exception ex) {
    // Log exception, alternate processing, etc.
  }