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How to check the coming output from main method?

For example, with the following main method.
public class Solution {
public static void main(String []argv) {
System.out.println("Hello World.");
System.out.println("Hello Java.");
}
}
I want to know how code a platform (Hackerrank, for example) would check that the main method prints the expected output.
Hello World.
Hello Java.
Is not easy imagine how to do it with Junit, at first sight.
I believe that an external program is checking the output, I mean something like this:
$ java Solution | runtests
Thank you

Your guess using unix pipe-lining is certainly a way that it could be done.
In Java, you could do it by running the java command and reading the output through an InputStream
// Create and start the process
Process pb = new ProcessBuilder("java", "Solution").start();
// Create a reader to read in each output line
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(pb.getInputStream()));
String line;
// Read in line by line
while((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
// ...
}
Note that the start() method of ProcessBuilder can throw an IOException, so you will need to account for that.

Java - Use Input and OutputStream of ProcessBuilder continuously

I want to use an external tool while extracting some data (loop through lines).
For that I first used Runtime.getRuntime().exec() to execute it.
But then my extraction got really slow. So I am searching for a possibility to exec the external tool in each instance of the loop, using the same instance of shell.
I found out, that I should use ProcessBuilder. But it's not working yet.
Here is my code to test the execution (with input from the answers here in the forum already):
public class ExecuteShell {
ProcessBuilder builder;
Process process = null;
BufferedWriter process_stdin;
BufferedReader reader, errReader;
public ExecuteShell() {
String command;
command = getShellCommandForOperatingSystem();
if(command.equals("")) {
return; //Fehler! No error handling yet
}
//init shell
builder = new ProcessBuilder( command);
builder.redirectErrorStream(true);
try {
process = builder.start();
} catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println(e);
}
//get stdout of shell
reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getInputStream()));
errReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getErrorStream()));
//get stdin of shell
process_stdin = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(process.getOutputStream()));
System.out.println("ExecuteShell: Constructor successfully finished");
}
public String executeCommand(String commands) {
StringBuffer output;
String line;
try {
//single execution
process_stdin.write(commands);
process_stdin.newLine();
process_stdin.flush();
} catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println(e);
}
output = new StringBuffer();
line = "";
try {
if (!reader.ready()) {
output.append("Reader empty \n");
return output.toString();
}
while ((line = reader.readLine())!= null) {
output.append(line + "\n");
return output.toString();
}
if (!reader.ready()) {
output.append("errReader empty \n");
return output.toString();
}
while ((line = errReader.readLine())!= null) {
output.append(line + "\n");
}
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("ExecuteShell: error in executeShell2File");
e.printStackTrace();
return "";
}
return output.toString();
}
public int close() {
// finally close the shell by execution exit command
try {
process_stdin.write("exit");
process_stdin.newLine();
process_stdin.flush();
}
catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println(e);
return 1;
}
return 0;
}
private static String getShellCommandForOperatingSystem() {
Properties prop = System.getProperties( );
String os = prop.getProperty( "os.name" );
if ( os.startsWith("Windows") ) {
//System.out.println("WINDOWS!");
return "C:/cygwin64/bin/bash";
} else if (os.startsWith("Linux") ) {
//System.out.println("Linux!");
return"/bin/sh";
}
return "";
}
}
I want to call it in another Class like this Testclass:
public class TestExec{
public static void main(String[] args) {
String result = "";
ExecuteShell es = new ExecuteShell();
for (int i=0; i<5; i++) {
// do something
result = es.executeCommand("date"); //execute some command
System.out.println("result:\n" + result); //do something with result
// do something
}
es.close();
}
}
My Problem is, that the output stream is always empty:
ExecuteShell: Constructor successfully finished
result:
Reader empty
result:
Reader empty
result:
Reader empty
result:
Reader empty
result:
Reader empty
I read the thread here: Java Process with Input/Output Stream
But the code snippets were not enough to get me going, I am missing something. I have not really worked with different threads much. And I am not sure if/how a Scanner is of any help to me. I would really appreciate some help.
Ultimatively, my goal is to call an external command repeatetly and make it fast.
EDIT:
I changed the loop, so that the es.close() is outside. And I wanted to add, that I do not want only this inside the loop.
EDIT:
The problem with the time was, that the command I called caused an error. When the command does not cause an error, the time is acceptable.
Thank you for your answers

You are probably experiencing a race condition: after writing the command to the shell, your Java program continues to run, and almost immediately calls reader.ready(). The command you wanted to execute has probably not yet output anything, so the reader has no data available. An alternative explanation would be that the command does not write anything to stdout, but only to stderr (or the shell, maybe it has failed to start the command?). You are however not reading from stderr in practice.
To properly handle output and error streams, you cannot check reader.ready() but need to call readLine() (which waits until data is available) in a loop. With your code, even if the program would come to that point, you would read only exactly one line from the output. If the program would output more than one line, this data would get interpreted as the output of the next command. The typical solution is to read in a loop until readLine() returns null, but this does not work here because this would mean your program would wait in this loop until the shell terminates (which would never happen, so it would just hang infinitely).
Fixing this would be pretty much impossible, if you do not know exactly how many lines each command will write to stdout and stderr.
However, your complicated approach of using a shell and sending commands to it is probably completely unnecessary. Starting a command from within your Java program and from within the shell is equally fast, and much easier to write. Similarly, there is no performance difference between Runtime.exec() and ProcessBuilder (the former just calls the latter), you only need ProcessBuilder if you need its advanced features.
If you are experiencing performance problems when calling external programs, you should find out where they are exactly and try to solve them, but not with this approach. For example, normally one starts a thread for reading from both the output and the error stream (if you do not start separate threads and the command produces large output, everything might hang). This could be slow, so you could use a thread pool to avoid repeated spawning of processes.

Is there a better way to read from a process's inputstream and then handle using specified methods?

I am writing a program doing the following works:
Run a command using ProcessBuilder (like "svn info" or "svn diff");
Read the output of the command from the process's getInputStream();
With the output of the command, I want either:
Parse the output and get what I want and use it later, OR:
Write the output directly to a specified file.
Now what I am doing is using BufferedReader to read whatever the command outputs by lines and save them to an ArrayList, and then decide if I would just scan the lines to find out something or write the lines to a file.
Obviously this is an ugly implement because the ArrayList should not be needed if I want a command's output to be saved to a file. So what will you suggest, to do it in a better way?
Here is some of my codes:
Use this to run command and read from the output of the process
private ArrayList<String> runCommand(String[] command) throws IOException {
ArrayList<String> result = new ArrayList<>();
_processBuilder.command(command);
Process process = null;
try {
process = _processBuilder.start();
try (InputStream inputStream = process.getInputStream();
InputStreamReader inputStreamReader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream);
BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(inputStreamReader)) {
String line;
while ((line = bufferedReader.readLine()) != null) {
result.add(line);
}
}
}
catch (IOException ex) {
_logger.log(Level.SEVERE, "Error!", ex);
}
finally {
if (process != null) {
try {
process.waitFor();
}
catch (InterruptedException ex) {
_logger.log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
}
}
}
return result;
}
and in one method I may do like this:
ArrayList<String> reuslt = runCommand(command1);
for (String line: result) {
// ...parse the line here...
}
and in another I may do like this:
ArrayList<String> result = runCommand(command2);
File file = new File(...filename, etc...);
try (PrintWriter printWriter = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter(file, false))) {
for (String line: result) {
printWriter.println(line);
}
}

Returning the process output in an ArrayList seems like a fine abstraction to me. Then the caller of runCommand() doesn't need to worry about how the command was run or the output read. The memory used by the extra list is probably not significant unless your command is very prolix.
The only time I could see this being an issue would be if the caller wanted to start processing the output while the command was still running, which doesn't seem to be the case here.
For very big output that you don't want to copy into memory first, one option would be to have runCommand() take a callback like Guava's LineProcessor that it will call for each line of the output. Then runCommand() can still abstract away the whole deal of running the process, reading the output, and closing everything afterwards, but data can be passed out to the callback as it runs rather than waiting for the method to return the whole response in one array.

I don't think it's a performance issue that you store the text uselessly in some cases. Nonetheless, for cleanliness, it might be better to write two methods:
private ArrayList<String> runCommand(String[] command)
private void runCommandAndDumpToFile(String[] command, File file)
(It wasn't quite clear from your question, but I assume that you know before running your process whether you'll just write the output to file or process it.)

How to run command line within java using thread async

I am new to java. I am tasked to write java program to run the command lines. I tested the command line under the DOS prompt since i do not have have access to Linux box yet. it worked fine. See the PROGRAM below for full command line syntax. the job will take 6 input files and generate some output files. Next i tried to create a class to and using getruntime and process to process this job. Even it compiled without error but when i run it just show the cursor blinking... i thought i need to use Thread async technique. please provide some advices since i do not have enough time for the projects. I also would like to implement a call back or return values when the job is done. an example would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
import java.io.*;
public class RunJob {
// public static final String PROGRAM = "c:\\wrk\\java.exe Hello";
//one command line below
public static final String PROGRAM = "c:/java.exe -cp \"wrk/jmp.jar;wrk/colt.jar\" gov.lanl.yadas.reliability.UltimateMissileReliabilityModel 10000 \"wrk/\" x1.dat x2c.dat x3.dat x4.dat x5.dat x6.dat true";
// Set to true to end the loop
static boolean done = false;
public static void main(String argv[]) throws IOException {
BufferedReader is;
String line;
String returnMsg = "Start ";
final Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(PROGRAM);
System.out.println("start");
Thread waiter = new Thread() {
public void run() {
try {
p.waitFor();
} catch (InterruptedException ex) {
System.out.println("InterruptedException");
return;
}
System.out.println("Program terminated!");
done = true;
}
};
waiter.start();
is = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()));
while (!done && ((line = is.readLine()) != null))
{
System.out.println(line);
returnMsg = returnMsg + line;
}
System.out.println(returnMsg);
System.out.println("End");
return;
}// main
}

I assume that there is a good reason why you want to run a java program from another java program and not just from a shell script, or by invoking an API - but if not - please reconsider.
As to your problem - if your application produces a lot of output (the one you are running as a process) - your application will hang. The p.waitFor() will halt until the process ends. But if you don't read the information from the InputStream - it will overflow and hang!
Advice #1: put the p.waitFor() at the end.
Advice #2: read this article. If I remember correctly it is the one I read when I had a similar problem. You can also google for "StreamGobbler" - it is a common name for a separate thread that "gobbles" your streams.
Advice #3: Don't forget the ErrorStream - if your application will produce too many errors - that stream will cause the process to hang as well.

Redirect Runtime.getRuntime().exec() output with System.setOut();

I have a program Test.java:
import java.io.*;
public class Test {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
System.setOut(new PrintStream(new FileOutputStream("test.txt")));
System.out.println("HelloWorld1");
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("echo HelloWorld2");
}
}
This is supposed to print HelloWorld1 and HelloWorld2 to the file text.txt. However, when I view the file, I only see HelloWorld1.
Where did HelloWorld2 go? Did it vanish into thin air?
Lets say I want to redirect HelloWorld2 to test.txt also. I can't just add a ">>test.txt" in the command because I'll get a file already open error. So how do I do this?

The standard output of Runtime.exec is not automatically sent to the standard output of the caller.
Something like this aught to do - get access to the standard output of the forked process, read it and then write it out. Note that the output from the forked process is availble to the parent using the getInputStream() method of the Process instance.
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
System.setOut(new PrintStream(new FileOutputStream("test.txt")));
System.out.println("HelloWorld1");
try {
String line;
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec( "echo HelloWorld2" );
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()) );
while ((line = in.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(line);
}
in.close();
}
catch (Exception e) {
// ...
}
}

Since JDK 1.5 there is java.lang.ProcessBuilder which handles std and err streams as well. It's sort of the replacement for java.lang.Runtime and you should be using it.

System.out is NOT the stdout from the new process you spawned by calling exec(). If you want to see the "HelloWorld2" you must get the Process returned from the exec() call, then call getOutputStream() from that.

Simpler way to achieve objective:
ProcessBuilder builder = new ProcessBuilder("hostname");
Process process = builder.start();
Scanner in = new Scanner(process.getInputStream());
System.out.println(in.nextLine()); // or use iterator for multilined output