Using command prompt with Java - java

I'm working on a Windows 7 machine.
I'm working on an application which is a front for the GHCi interpreter for Haskell. The user will input a command, then Java will execute the command via the exec() method on Runtime, and then the application will display the text that would display if the user was just running GHCi using command prompt.
Right now, I'm running into issues with the loop that prints the output.
Here is the code I have right now.
public class GHCiTest {
public static Scanner rd, sc;
/**
* #param args the command line arguments
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
System.out.println("Starting... ");
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("ghci");
PrintStream hugsin = new PrintStream(p.getOutputStream());
InputStream hugsout = p.getInputStream();
sc = new Scanner(hugsout);
rd = new Scanner(System.in);
String rdnextline;
while (true){
while (sc.hasNextLine()){
System.out.println(sc.nextLine());
}
System.out.println("yay");
rdnextline = rd.nextLine();
if (rdnextline == "quit"){break;}
hugsin.println(rdnextline);
hugsin.flush();
}
System.out.println(" ... successful completion.");
}
catch(IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
I know that the initial starting of GHCi is working, because the program is printing out "GHCi, version 7.10.3: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help". However, the issue appears to be the while(sc.hasNextLine()) loop, which is supposed to read the output of the command prompt and output it until there's nothing left, as it won't break out of the loop and proceed to read the user input. I know this because the program isn't printing the "yay" flag I put in after the loop.

Receive output of ghci in another thread like this.
System.out.println("Starting... ");
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("ghci");
PrintStream hugsin = new PrintStream(p.getOutputStream());
InputStream hugsout = p.getInputStream();
Scanner rd = new Scanner(System.in);
new Thread(() -> {
try (Reader r = new InputStreamReader(hugsout)) {
int ch;
while ((ch = r.read()) != -1)
System.out.print((char)ch);
} catch (IOException e ) {}
}).start();
Scanner sc = new Scanner(hugsout);
String rdnextline;
while (true) {
rdnextline = rd.nextLine();
hugsin.println(rdnextline);
hugsin.flush();
if (rdnextline.equals("quit")) {
break;
}
}
System.out.println(" ... successful completion.");

Your loop won't exit until the end of the stream has been reached:
while (sc.hasNextLine()){
System.out.println(sc.nextLine());
}
The end of the stream is the end of your process. So, your Java program is waiting for the sub process to run to completion, and terminate. Once that happens, the loop will end, and the Java program will send the desired commands to the process.
Sorry, I mean, try to send the desired commands to the process; it won't succeed because the process has terminated.
If the GHCi process outputs a "prompt" of some kind, you could try to break your while(...) { print } at that moment, get input from the user, send that to the process, and then loop back and re-enter your while(...) { print }, waiting for the next prompt.
Assuming the prompt does not end with a newline, but rather appears at the start of a line where the user input gets typed, you cannot use a while(sc.hasNextLine()) { ... } type of loop, because the prompt is not a complete line. You might have to resort to reading character by character, looking for the prompt sequence in the last "n" characters.
Looks like you can change the prompt in GHCi. See here for details. If you change the prompt to end with a newline, you could still read the stream in lines.
while (sc.hasNextLine()){
String line = sc.nextLine();
if (line.equals("YourPromptHere"))
break;
System.out.println(line);
}
(Alternately, you might be able to do something with threads to allow both parts to run without blocking each other. Of course, threading comes with its own issues and complexity.)
EDIT
I had a blinding flash of the obvious. Assuming GHC's prompt looks like this ...
GHCi, version 7.10.3
yada, yada, yada ...
Main> _
... you could set the scanner's delimiter to be the prompt string Main>.
// Set scanner delimiter to GHCi's Prompt string
sc = new Scanner(hugsout).setDelimiter("^Main> ");
while (sc.hasNext()) {
// Echo GHCi's output upto the delimiter (prompt)
System.out.println(sc.next());
// Read user input & transfer to GHCi.
System.out.print("Replacement Prompt> ");
rdnextline = rd.nextLine();
if (rdnextline == "quit") {
break;
}
hugsin.println(rdnextline);
hugsin.flush();
}
Note: This does not take into account the secondary prompt, used when GHCi expects more input to complete the command. You could use a regex something like "^Main> |\bAlt> " that matches either prompt, but you would not be able to tell which prompt the delimiter matched.
The first subexpression "^Main> " matches the start of a line, followed by "Main> ", where as the second subexpression "\bAlt> " only matches a word boundary followed by "Alt> ". This is because the output stream of the GHCi, would look like "\nMain> Alt> " with a long pause before the Alt>; the "newline" before Alt> would normally come from the echoing of the Enter keypressed on the input stream.

Related

Java reader does not start printing until closing the programm [duplicate]

I have the following code example below. Whereby you can enter a command to the bash shell i.e. echo test and have the result echo'd back. However, after the first read. Other output streams don't work?
Why is this or am I doing something wrong? My end goal is to created a Threaded scheduled task that executes a command periodically to /bash so the OutputStream and InputStream would have to work in tandem and not stop working. I have also been experiencing the error java.io.IOException: Broken pipe any ideas?
Thanks.
String line;
Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
Process process = Runtime.getRuntime ().exec ("/bin/bash");
OutputStream stdin = process.getOutputStream ();
InputStream stderr = process.getErrorStream ();
InputStream stdout = process.getInputStream ();
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader (new InputStreamReader(stdout));
BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(stdin));
String input = scan.nextLine();
input += "\n";
writer.write(input);
writer.flush();
input = scan.nextLine();
input += "\n";
writer.write(input);
writer.flush();
while ((line = reader.readLine ()) != null) {
System.out.println ("Stdout: " + line);
}
input = scan.nextLine();
input += "\n";
writer.write(input);
writer.close();
while ((line = reader.readLine ()) != null) {
System.out.println ("Stdout: " + line);
}
Firstly, I would recommend replacing the line
Process process = Runtime.getRuntime ().exec ("/bin/bash");
with the lines
ProcessBuilder builder = new ProcessBuilder("/bin/bash");
builder.redirectErrorStream(true);
Process process = builder.start();
ProcessBuilder is new in Java 5 and makes running external processes easier. In my opinion, its most significant improvement over Runtime.getRuntime().exec() is that it allows you to redirect the standard error of the child process into its standard output. This means you only have one InputStream to read from. Before this, you needed to have two separate Threads, one reading from stdout and one reading from stderr, to avoid the standard error buffer filling while the standard output buffer was empty (causing the child process to hang), or vice versa.
Next, the loops (of which you have two)
while ((line = reader.readLine ()) != null) {
System.out.println ("Stdout: " + line);
}
only exit when the reader, which reads from the process's standard output, returns end-of-file. This only happens when the bash process exits. It will not return end-of-file if there happens at present to be no more output from the process. Instead, it will wait for the next line of output from the process and not return until it has this next line.
Since you're sending two lines of input to the process before reaching this loop, the first of these two loops will hang if the process hasn't exited after these two lines of input. It will sit there waiting for another line to be read, but there will never be another line for it to read.
I compiled your source code (I'm on Windows at the moment, so I replaced /bin/bash with cmd.exe, but the principles should be the same), and I found that:
after typing in two lines, the output from the first two commands appears, but then the program hangs,
if I type in, say, echo test, and then exit, the program makes it out of the first loop since the cmd.exe process has exited. The program then asks for another line of input (which gets ignored), skips straight over the second loop since the child process has already exited, and then exits itself.
if I type in exit and then echo test, I get an IOException complaining about a pipe being closed. This is to be expected - the first line of input caused the process to exit, and there's nowhere to send the second line.
I have seen a trick that does something similar to what you seem to want, in a program I used to work on. This program kept around a number of shells, ran commands in them and read the output from these commands. The trick used was to always write out a 'magic' line that marks the end of the shell command's output, and use that to determine when the output from the command sent to the shell had finished.
I took your code and I replaced everything after the line that assigns to writer with the following loop:
while (scan.hasNext()) {
String input = scan.nextLine();
if (input.trim().equals("exit")) {
// Putting 'exit' amongst the echo --EOF--s below doesn't work.
writer.write("exit\n");
} else {
writer.write("((" + input + ") && echo --EOF--) || echo --EOF--\n");
}
writer.flush();
line = reader.readLine();
while (line != null && ! line.trim().equals("--EOF--")) {
System.out.println ("Stdout: " + line);
line = reader.readLine();
}
if (line == null) {
break;
}
}
After doing this, I could reliably run a few commands and have the output from each come back to me individually.
The two echo --EOF-- commands in the line sent to the shell are there to ensure that output from the command is terminated with --EOF-- even in the result of an error from the command.
Of course, this approach has its limitations. These limitations include:
if I enter a command that waits for user input (e.g. another shell), the program appears to hang,
it assumes that each process run by the shell ends its output with a newline,
it gets a bit confused if the command being run by the shell happens to write out a line --EOF--.
bash reports a syntax error and exits if you enter some text with an unmatched ).
These points might not matter to you if whatever it is you're thinking of running as a scheduled task is going to be restricted to a command or a small set of commands which will never behave in such pathological ways.
EDIT: improve exit handling and other minor changes following running this on Linux.
I think you can use thread like demon-thread for reading your input and your output reader will already be in while loop in main thread so you can read and write at same time.You can modify your program like this:
Thread T=new Thread(new Runnable() {
#Override
public void run() {
while(true)
{
String input = scan.nextLine();
input += "\n";
try {
writer.write(input);
writer.flush();
} catch (IOException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
} );
T.start();
and you can reader will be same as above i.e.
while ((line = reader.readLine ()) != null) {
System.out.println ("Stdout: " + line);
}
make your writer as final otherwise it wont be able to accessible by inner class.
You have writer.close(); in your code. So bash receives EOF on its stdin and exits. Then you get Broken pipe when trying to read from the stdoutof the defunct bash.

Java exec stdin not flushing

For a school project I am trying to create a terminal in Java. The terminal works in the following way:
User types a command
Program grabs command and replaces <command> with the command in the string
/bin/bash -c "cd current/directory/; <command>; echo kjsfdjkadhlga; pwd
Program starts the process created via a ProcessBuilder object
Program spawns a thread that reads from stdout and stderr
Program continues looking for user input, and if the command is done running, then whatever the user entered is run as a command, otherwise it is fed to the currently running command as input.
As output is generated, program looks through the output for the kjsfdjkadhlga string so it knows when the user's command is done being run, and then grabs the remaining output and stores it as the current path that the user is at.
How this works/reasons for everything:
In order to avoid myself having to implement my own input parser to handle things like multiple commands on a line, IO redirection, and whatnot to work with the ProcessBuilder, I just essentially convert the command to a bash script and let bash execute it.
Since every process executes only a single command (or whatever it was given at the time of creation, which is a single user command in this case) then terminates, no process specific information is stored, such as the current working directory. To transfer that information, I call pwd after the user's command and then in the process of the next command, but before the user's command is run, I cd to that directory, effectively allowing the value of $PWD to persist between processes.
The Problem:
It all works well, except for when user interaction is required. If the user just types cat, it is supposed to wait for a line of user input, then print it, then wait for a line of user input, then print it, and repeat forever (I don't handle Crtl+C yet...). However, what actually happens is that the terminal waits for a line of user input, then prints it, then terminates without waiting for more input.
What I have tried:
Currently, I provide input to the command being run with:
BufferedWriter stdin = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(process.getOutputStream()));
stdin.write(input);
stdin.newLine();
stdin.close();
If instead of calling close(), I call flush(), then cat ends up waiting for user input and not doing anything until I terminate my Terminal program, at which point it then prints everything the user had input.
It appears that the flush() function doesn't actually do anything. A Stack Overflow question mentioned using the raw OutputStream and calling write() instead of using a BufferedWriter. However, that has the same effect. In the OutputStream documentation for flush(), it states that "The flush method of OutputStream does nothing."
I have also tried using a BufferedOutputStream, but the documentation says that its flush function simply forces the buffered data to be written to the underlying OutputStream, which doesn't change the fact that the OutputStream is not flushing its stream.
This question seems to be the most promising, but I couldn't get it to work when implementing it. It may be because I am on Mac OS instead of Windows.
Does anybody know how to do this if keeping stdin open long enough to submit multiple lines of input is possible, or if I am going about it wrong?
Code
main()
Terminal terminal = new Terminal();
Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
while (in.hasNextLine())
{
String line = in.nextLine();
terminal.sendInput(line, terminal);
}
terminal.sendInput() called by main
// ProcessReaderDelegate implements functions called when receiving output on stdout, stderr, and when the process terminates.
public int sendInput(String text, ProcessReaderDelegate delegate)
{
if (processes.size() > 0)
{
processes.get(0).sendInput(text); // Is a ProcessReader object
return 1;
}
run(text, delegate); // runs the given text as the <command> text described above
return 2;
}
ProcessReader's sendInput() called by terminal.sendInput()
public boolean sendInput(String input)
{
try
{
// stdin and process are a instance fields
// tried this and doesn't seem to work (with either flush or close)
stdin = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(process.getOutputStream()));
stdin.write(input);
stdin.newLine();
stdin.close();
// tried this and doesn't seem to work (with either flush or close)
//BufferedOutputStream os = new BufferedOutputStream(process.getOutputStream());
//os.write(input.getBytes());
//os.write("\n".getBytes());
//os.flush();
//os.close();
return true;
}
catch (IOException e)
{
System.out.println("ERROR: this should never happen: " + e.getMessage());
return false;
}
}
terminal.run() called by terminal.sendInput()
public void run(String command, ProcessReaderDelegate delegate)
{
// don't do anything with empty command since it screws up the command concatentaion later
if (command.equals(""))
{
delegate.receivedOutput(null, prompt);
return;
}
try
{
// create the command
List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
list.add(shellPath);
list.add(UNIX_BASED ? "-c" : "Command : ");
String cmd = (UNIX_BASED ? getUnixCommand(command) : getWindowsCommand(command));
list.add(cmd);
//System.out.println("command='" + list.get(0) + " " + list.get(1) + " " + list.get(2) + "'");
// create the process and run it
ProcessBuilder builder = new ProcessBuilder(list);
Process p = builder.start();
ProcessReader stdout = new ProcessReader(p, delegate, this);
new Thread(stdout).start();
processes.add(stdout);
}
catch (IOException e)
{
System.out.println(e.getMessage());
}
}
ProcessReader.run() executed in thread and reads stdout and stderr
public void run()
{
try
{
boolean hitend = false;
String buffer = "";
while (true)
{
int c;
String text;
// ======================================================
// read from stdout
// read the next character
c = stdout.read();
// build the string
while (c != -1) // while data available in the stream
{
buffer += (char)c;
c = stdout.read();
}
// send the string to the delegate
if ((!hitend) && (buffer.length() > 0))
{
// END_STRING is the "kjsfdjkadhlga" echoed after the command executes
int index = buffer.indexOf(END_STRING);
if (index >= 0)
{
hitend = true;
text = buffer.substring(0, index);
buffer = buffer.substring(index + END_STRING.length());
if (outputDelegate != null)
{
outputDelegate.receivedOutput(process, text);
}
}
else
{
for (int i = END_STRING.length() - 1; i >= 0; i--)
{
index = buffer.indexOf(END_STRING.substring(0, i));
if (i == 0)
{
index = buffer.length();
}
if (index >= 0)
{
text = buffer.substring(0, index);
buffer = buffer.substring(index + i);
if (outputDelegate != null)
{
outputDelegate.receivedOutput(process, text);
}
}
}
}
}
// ======================================================
// read from stderr
// read the next character
c = stderr.read();
text = ""; // slow method; make faster with array
// build the string
while (c != -1) // while data available in the stream
{
text += (char)c;
c = stderr.read();
}
// send the string to the delegate
if ((text.length() > 0) && (outputDelegate != null))
{
outputDelegate.receivedError(process, text);
}
// ======================================================
// check if the process is done (and hence no more output)
boolean done = false;
try
{
int value = process.exitValue();
done = true; // if got to this point, then process is done
// read the ending environment variables
Map<String, String> env = new HashMap<String, String>();
String[] words = buffer.split(" ");
env.put(ENV_WORKING_DIR, words[0]);
if (envDelegate != null)
{
envDelegate.processTerminatedWithEnvironment(process, env);
}
// end the process
outputDelegate.processEnded(process);
stdout.close();
stderr.close();
break;
}
catch (Exception e) {System.out.println(e.getMessage());} // no exit value --> process not done
if (done) // just on the off chance that closing the streams crashes everything
{
break;
}
}
}
catch (IOException e)
{
System.out.println("ERROR: ProcessReader: " + e.getMessage());
}
}

java.util.Scanner: wait for input

I use java.util.Scanner to read the commands from the console.
try
{
ICommand cmd = cmdReader.ReadCommand();
cmd.Execute(conn);
}
catch(MyException ex)
{
// print a message about unknown command
continue;
}
Where ReadCommand is implemented as follows:
try (Scanner scanIn = new Scanner(System.in))
{
if (!scanIn.hasNextLine()) return null;
line_ = scanIn.nextLine();
ICommand command = parser_.ParseCommand(line_);
return command;
}
In the first iteration code works fine, I write something invalid (not a command), the code prints a warning and continues. But other iterations return null here if (!scanIn.hasNextLine()) return null; even if I write something in a console. Looks like java.util.Scanner doesn't see the input. Am I doing something wrong? And how then I can wait for the user input (don't want to use the cycle with sleep)?
You should not create a new Scanner instance each time you call ReadCommand. Create one and reuse it while reading input.
From the documentation:
When a Scanner is closed, it will close its input source if the source implements the Closeable interface.
So, your System.in stream is closed after you read the first input.
See also Java Scanner does not wait for input

User input to the command line when using Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command);

I dont think this is possible, but I have been using:
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command);
to run commands on the command line, but now I have come accross a situation where the command I am running part way through will ask for some user input, for example a username.
This can not be resolved by a argument to the command that is being exec, is there any way I can pass the username to the same command line instance and continue?
---EDIT---
I still cant get this to work. These are the steps on the command line:
C:\someProgram.exe
Login:
Passowrd:
So I need to pass the login and password when it prompts at runtime. The code I've got that doesnt work:
try {
String CMD = "\"C:\\someProgram\"";
Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
ProcessBuilder builder = new ProcessBuilder(CMD);
builder.redirectErrorStream(true);
Process process = builder.start();
InputStream is = process.getInputStream();
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader (new InputStreamReader(is));
OutputStream out = process.getOutputStream();
BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(out));
String line;
try {
while (scan.hasNext()) {
String input = scan.nextLine();
if (input.toLowerCase().startsWith("login")) {
writer.write("myUsername");
} else if(input.toLowerCase().startsWith("password")){
writer.write("myPassword");
}
writer.flush();
line = reader.readLine();
while (line != null) {
System.out.println ("Stdout: " + line);
line = reader.readLine();
}
if (line == null) {
break;
}
}
process.waitFor();
}
finally {;
writer.close();
reader.close();
}
}
catch (Exception err) {
System.err.println("some message");
}
Ive tried things like:
writer.write("myUsername\n");
Any help, i can see that someProgram.exe is called and running in the processes, but it just hangs.
Just write to p.getOutputStream(). That'll send the username to the process's standard input, which should do what you want.
out = p.getOutputStream();
out.write("fooUsername\n".getBytes());
out.flush();
You should redirect the command input and send your parameters there. Use process.setInputStream(), the write into this stream.
As part your command String, if you are running on Unix/Linux/OSX and maybe PowerShell, you could prepend the cat shell command to have the shell dump the contents of a file into the input stream for your intended executable to read as input.
A command something like cat user_input.txt | myAppWantsInput.pl.
This will take the content of user_input.txt, dump it into standard-in, so when "myAppWantsInput.pl" in your command executes, and reads from standard-in, it will be reading the contents of the file and taking that as input as if entered from the keyboard.
Of course, it you don't know a priori what values you intend to pass, you could generate the files you need dynamically before invoke the command. This won't work if you can't determine all the input you'll want before you run the command.

how to handle a command-line input like "java.exe program < s1.in"

I know how to use string args to get the input from the command-line, and it is working fine with input = args[0] where my input is java.exe program s1.in
But I need to run a compare program in terminal. So my input must have the "<" symbol. However, then I can't get my input values using input = args[1]. When I type this in, the args.length become 0. Why does this happen?
As an aside, does anyone know how to best search for this kind of term in google? Itthink google does not recognize "<" in the search entry.
Thank you
It's because when you use xyzzy <inputfile, your shell runs xyzzy and "connects" that file to your standard input. It then expects you to read that standard input to get your data - you never see the argument because it's removed from the command line (or, more likely, never added to your argument list).
That's why many programs will process a file if given, otherwise they'll read their data from standard input. And that's exactly what you need to do here.
For doing this, you'll probably want something like:
import java.io.*;
class Test {
public static void main(String args[]) {
InputStreamReader inp = null;
Boolean isStdIn = false;
try {
if (args.length > 0) {
inp = new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(args[0]));
} else {
inp = new InputStreamReader(System.in);
isStdIn = true;
}
// Now process inp.
if (isStdIn)
inp.close();
} catch (Exception e) {
System.exit(1);
}
}
}
It selects either the file (if available) or the standard input stream for reading.
Often, the most easy way is to use Scanner:
Scanner scaner = new Scanner (System.in);

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