Is there a way to start a process in Java? in .Net this is done with for example:
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("processname");
Is there an equivalent in Java so I can then let the user find the application and then it would work for any OS?
http://www.rgagnon.com/javadetails/java-0014.html
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.nio.file.Paths;
public class CmdExec {
public static void main(String args[]) {
try {
// enter code here
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(
Paths.get(System.getenv("windir"), "system32", "tree.com /A").toString()
);
// enter code here
try(BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()))) {
String line;
while ((line = input.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(line);
}
}
} catch (Exception err) {
err.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
You can get the local path using System properties or a similar approach.
http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/environment/sysprop.html
The Java Class Library represents external processes using the java.lang.Process class. Processes can be spawned using a java.lang.ProcessBuilder:
Process process = new ProcessBuilder("processname").start();
or the older interface exposed by the overloaded exec methods on the java.lang.Runtime class:
Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("processname");
Both of these will code snippets will spawn a new process, which usually executes asynchronously and can be interacted with through the resulting Process object. If you need to check that the process has finished (or wait for it to finish), don't forget to check that the exit value (exit code) returned by process.exitValue() or process.waitFor() is as expected (0 for most programs), since no exception is thrown if the process exits abnormally.
Also note that additional code is often necessary to handle the process's I/O correctly, as described in the documentation for the Process class (emphasis added):
By default, the created subprocess does not have its own terminal or console. All its standard I/O (i.e. stdin, stdout, stderr) operations will be redirected to the parent process, where they can be accessed via the streams obtained using the methods getOutputStream(), getInputStream(), and getErrorStream(). The parent process uses these streams to feed input to and get output from the subprocess. Because some native platforms only provide limited buffer size for standard input and output streams, failure to promptly write the input stream or read the output stream of the subprocess may cause the subprocess to block, or even deadlock.
One way to make sure that I/O is correctly handled and that the exit value indicates success is to use a library like jproc that deals with the intricacies of capturing stdout and stderr, and offers a simple synchronous interface to run external processes:
ProcResult result = new ProcBuilder("processname").run();
jproc is available via maven central:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.buildobjects</groupId>
<artifactId>jproc</artifactId>
<version>2.5.1</version>
</dependency>
See Runtime.exec() and the Process class. In its simplest form:
Process myProcess = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command);
...
Note that you also need to read the process' output (eg: myProcess.getInputStream()) -- or the process will hang on some systems. This can be highly confusing the first time, and should be included in any introduction to these APIs. See James P.'s response for an example.
You might also want to look into the new ProcessBuilder class, which makes it easier to change environment variables and to invoke subprocesses :
Process myProcess = new ProcessBuilder(command, arg).start();
...
Related
This is a very unusual problem I've come across and I'm hoping someone might have some insight on it. I'm on macOS Mojave (10.14.6), using Amazon's JRE Corretto-11.0.9.12.1 (build 11.0.9.1+12-LTS)
I have a program I've written that is something of a scripting engine that we use to do our routine bulk data processing. It takes an xml "script" file which contains the processing directions to execute and a list of input files as arguments. I'll refer to this as the "engine" from this point on. This engine is the backbone of a large portion of our automation. It shows a progress bar while processing to let users know that it is working.
There are 2 programs that use this engine:
One is a thin UI written in Swing, which we use to manually process data; it generates an xml file from the user input and passes it along with the input files and launches the engine in a separate process; the UI itself doesn't process any data.
The other watches a folder on our file server and processes incoming data from our clients daily when a folder is created inside of it so we can rip the data into our database. I'll call this the "importer".
Recently, a problem has come up where the engine becomes stuck while processing. Older versions of the engine did not have this problem, and I'm trying to figure out what exactly changed that caused this to happen, but while I've been trying to do this, our UI and importer programs have been using and older version of the engine. There are new features that we need to use in the new version of the engine, but we can't use it until this problem is solved.
The programs that uses the engine launch it in a process then waits for the result before continuing:
// example command generated from external program
String commandString = "java -jar engine.jar script.xml input_file1.txt input_file2.txt input_file3.txt";
String[] command = {"bash", "-c", commandString};
// I can grab the command from here for debugging
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(command));
ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder(command);
// wait for the process to complete before continuing
Process p = pb.start();
p.waitFor();
int result = p.exitValue();
try (BufferedReader e = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(proc.getErrorStream()));
BufferedReader i = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(proc.getInputStream()))) {
String line;
while ((line = e.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(line);
}
while ((line = i.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(line);
}
}
p.destroy();
// do other stuff
When launched in this way, there is a specific operation that causes the engine to hang. But if I take the command and launch it directly from the command line, the engine runs just fine! This is making it difficult to pin down where exactly the problem is; is it in the engine, or in the other programs? I've spent a couple of days looking for answers and come up with nothing. It's even more frustrating that this problem has appeared seemingly out of nowhere when it was working perfectly before, using the exact code above, for a quite a long time.
The operation where the engine hangs sorts files into folders based on their file names. When I watch my activity monitor while it runs, it's not taxing my resources at all, and disk space isn't an issue. It isn't a file permission issue, as the engine is creating files and folders all the time and in every step leading up to the step where it hangs. And as I said, if I run the command directly from the command line, it creates the folders and sorts the files without issue, to my extreme confusion.
The importer and UI run locally on a station, but the engine jar file lives on our file server, so that it is accessible to every station without individually downloading it everywhere each time there is an update. I thought at first that the issue might lie in the fact that it is being accessed over the network, but the problem occurs even when I use a local copy of the engine on my dev machine, so I have ruled that out. I've also ruled out that it's the JRE, even though we switched to it recently, since the older version of the engine still perform as expected.
There might of course be any reason why your 'engine' program may hang ;-) but certainly it will hang you don't read the its output, and in the right way:
The parent process needs to read the standard output and standard error streams of the child process, given that the child process does generate any substantial amount of output on any of these two channels. This must be done in two separate background threads. If the parent does not read the child's output, then the child process will block as soon as the (small) buffer between the processes is filled up.
The threads should be started as soon as the child process is started, and before the parent calls process.waitFor().
The simplest way to do this is the following:
Process process = processBuilder.start();
InputStream stdout = process.getInputStream();
InputStream stderr = process.getErrorStream();
Thread stdoutThread = new Thread() {
#Override
public void run() {
// read stdout here, e.g.
try {
int c;
while (-1 != (c = stdout.read())) {
// do whatever with c
}
} catch (IOException ioex) {
// ...
}
}
};
Thread stderrThread = new Thread() {
// ... same as for stdout
};
stdoutThread.start();
stderrThread.start();
}
Only after both threads have been started you may wait for the child process and join the threads:
int exitValue = process.waitFor();
stdoutThread.join();
stderrThread.join();
There might be more sophisticated ways to work with background threads using the Concurrency Framework introduced in Java 5, but this basic code gives the idea.
Environment: Windows 7
I'm launching an external process with ProcessBuilder. This external program can be called with an argument defining how many CPU cores to use. It then launches as many processes to perform the calculation.
The issue seems to be that the initial called process then immediately terminates. So process.waitFor() does not actually wait for the calculation to complete.
How can I make it wait for the child-process it spwaned? Or how can i wait til all process of a specific name have been terminated?
EDIT due to comments:
ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder("myExe", "-i", inputFile, "-o", outputFile, "-np", "4");
pb.directory(new File(tempPath));
Process myProcess = pb.start();
myProcess.waitFor();
Process is a 3-rd party exe file (no GUI).
EDIT 2 Possible workaround (which has another issue):
As a workaround I tried a solution found with google:
while(wait) {
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(System.getenv("windir") +"\\system32\\"+"tasklist.exe /fi \"imagename eq myExe.exe\"");
BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream(), "US-ASCII"));
while ((line = input.readLine()) != null) {
if (line.startsWith("INFO: No tasks are running")) {
wait = false;
}
}
if (wait) {
Thread.sleep(2000);
}
input.close();
}
This should return a list of all processes with the given name. Problem is the list is always empty when called from Java but works correctly when called from the cli manually. Any ideas why?
Java-like dirty solution
Currently java.lang.Process is rather poor and is getting enriched.
For example, here you can find the feature requests. In java 8,
you already have methods like isAlive and destroyForcibly So
you can try something like the following dirty solution:
Get the id of the main process by reflection.
Get the child processes - specific for Windows
Wait for the found child processes
Steps 2 and 3 can be implemented as one script and executed as
java.lang.Process.waitFor
Work with the executable
I suppose, that the executable is some kind of MPI program. If you have access to the sources, i'd better change it to work correctly and waiting for all threads.
Suppose I have a java.lang.Process process object representing a sub-process I want to start from Java. I need to get both stdout and stderr output from the sub-process combined as a single String, and for the purpose of this question, I have chosen to store stdout first, followed by stderr. Based on my current understanding, I should be reading from them simultaneously. Sounds like a good task for CompletableFuture, I presume?
Hence, I have the following code snippets:
Getting the output
final CompletableFuture<String> output = fromStream(process.getInputStream()).thenCombine(
fromStream(process.getErrorStream()),
(stdout, stderr) -> Stream.concat(stdout, stderr).collect(Collectors.joining("\n")));
// to actually get the result, for example
System.out.println(output.get());
fromStream() helper method
public static CompletableFuture<Stream<String>> fromStream(final InputStream stream) {
return CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> {
return new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(stream)).lines();
});
}
Is there a better/nicer Java-8-way of doing this task? I understand there are the redirectOutput() and redirectError() methods from ProcessBuilder, but I don't suppose I can use them to redirect to just a String?
As pointed out in the comments, I missed out on the redirectErrorStream(boolean) method that allows me to pipe stderr to stdout internally, so there's only one stream to deal with. In this case, using a CompletableFuture is completely overkill (pun unintended...?) and I'll probably be better off without it.
I try to run a python script in my java programm. What I want to do is to catch the exitValue of the python programm and write it via System.out.println out.
Here is the Python code:
import sys
import subprocess
print "hallo"
i = sys.argv[0]
path = "R:\\xxx\\xxx\\xxx\\read"
resultlist = []
if i == 0:
result = True
else:
result = False
resultlist.append(result)
resultlist.append(path)
sys.exit(resultlist)
The Processbuilder methods .waitFor() and .exitValue() just gives a 0 or a 1 out. So I cant use it.
Is there any possible way to catch the value/string of sys.exit(resultlist) from the python script in my java programm?
man 2 exit:
The function _exit() terminates the calling process "immediately". Any open file descriptors belonging to the process are closed; any children of the process
are inherited by process 1, init, and the process's parent is sent a SIGCHLD signal.
**The value status is returned to the parent process as the process's exit status, and can be collected using one of the wait(2) family of calls.**
You cannot return "complex values" with exit(2) (the syscall) to begin with. If python does that then fine, but it's a "trick". Don't rely on it.
What you want to do is print the output of your program to stdout and capture stdout. For this, use the Process's .getInputStream() and swallow it in, for instance, a ByteArrayOutputStream.
Since you use a ProcessBuilder, you can also use its .redirectOutput() method before executing the process. Since Java 7, it has quite a few options available.
I am running an .exe file from my program and it is taking certain time for the same.The output from this command is used in the following statements for further processing. The output is a boolean variable. But the program is returning false immediately, but in fact the command is still in execution and is taking certain time. Because of the false value the subsequent statements is throwing an error. How do i handle this situation.
The return_var = exec(pagecmd) is the executing statement.
boolean return_var = false;
if("true".equals(getConfig("splitmode", ""))){
System.out.println("Inside splitmode if**********************");
String pagecmd = command.replace("%", page);
pagecmd = pagecmd + " -p " + page;
File f = new File(swfFilePath);
System.out.println("The swffile inside splitmode block exists is -----"+f.exists());
System.out.println("The pagecmd is -----"+pagecmd);
if(!f.exists()){
return_var = exec(pagecmd);
System.out.println("The return_var inside splitmode is----"+return_var);
if(return_var) {
strResult=doc;
}else{
strResult = "Error converting document, make sure the conversion tool is installed and that correct user permissions are applied to the SWF Path directory" +
getDocUrl();
}
In conjuction with waitFor() suggested by Andreas, you may also need to use getInputStream of Process object returned by exec() to retrieve the data written by the program you are executing.
Assumed that you are finally using Runtime.exec() inside your exec() method, you can use the waitFor() method of the Process object which is returned from Runtime.exec() to wait until the execution has finished:
...
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(pagecmd);
int result = p.waitFor();
...
The return value from waitFor() is the exit code of the sub process.
If you actually need to read output from the sub process which the sub process is writing to its stderr or stdout channel, you need to use Process.getInputStream() (Note: not getOutputStream()) and Process.getErrorStream() and read the sub processes output from these streams. Then, check the return values from the stream's read() methods to check if the sub process has terminated (or at least closed its output streams) instead of using waitFor().
Also, for these kind of problems, you should consider using the Apache commons exec library.
Alternatively, you might want to check the ProcessBuilder class.