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Java Run System Command and Ignore Output

Is there any sane way to run a system command from Java that ignores STDOUT and STDERR? For example, when I try the following:
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("some_executable_path param1 param2 >NUL 2>&1");
Java tries to parse the command, and ends up escaping the arguments (e.g., prevents the output from being redirected). If I don't redirect STDOUT/STDERR, the buffers fill up and prevent the system call from exiting. The following does what I want, but is extremely cumbersome and creates expensive resources just to throw the output of the system call away:
ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder("some_executable_path", "param1", "param2");
pb.redirectErrorStream(true);
final Process p = pb.start();
final Thread redirectToNull = new Thread(() -> {
final InputStream stdout = process.getInputStream();
try {
while (stdout.read() != -1);
} catch (final Exception e) {
// Don't care
}
}, "Output Consumer Thread");
redirectToNull.setDaemon(true);
redirectToNull.start();
I realize the Java design team is known to be masochistic, but this is ridiculous. I would prefer to deliver a batch or Perl script that wraps the system call with my application rather than use the above code. There has to be an easier way to accomplish this.
So the question is, is there any sane way to run a system command from within Java and ignore the output printed to STDOUT/STDERR?

It's not that Java 'prevents' redirection, it just doesn't affirmatively do it, and neither does your program. When you give CMD a command like program arg1 arg2 >out 2>err <in, it is CMD that sets up those redirections and then invokes program with arg1 arg2 only, not >out etc. On Unix the shells do the same -- there is a choice of several shells, but all of them handle redirection like this. Similarly pipes are set up by CMD or shells, not by either or all of the programs run in those pipes.
Thus on Windows the way to do this is either run CMD and have it do the redirections:
Process p = new ProcessBuilder ("cmd", "/c", "program arg1 arg2 >NUL 2>&1").start();
// this uses CMD's default parsing for args, so they must not contain space
// unless you insert 'data' quotes, or things that look like a substitutable %var%
or (assuming Java7+) tell ProcessBuilder to do the redirections:
pb.redirectOutput (new File("NUL")).redirectErrorStream(true)

using python subprocess to run javaw.exe

I use javaw.exe in a Windows command prompt and it returns immediately after spawning my Swing java program.
But if I use Python's subprocess.call() to do the same thing, it hangs.
import subprocess
retval = subprocess.call(['javaw.exe','-jar','myjar.jar',arg1,arg2])
What am I doing wrong and why is there this difference?

subprocess.call will wait for the process (javaw) to complete, as it says in the docs:
Run the command described by args. Wait for command to complete, then return the returncode attribute.
You should probably use subprocess.Popen instead.
Check out the docs for replacing the os.spawn family:
pid = os.spawnlp(os.P_NOWAIT, "/bin/mycmd", "mycmd", "myarg")
==>
pid = Popen(["/bin/mycmd", "myarg"]).pid
In your case, this is probably
pid = subprocess.Popen(["javaw.exe", "-jar", "myjar.jar", arg1, arg2])
perhaps adjusted to get the absolute path to javaw.exe, or shell=True, depending on your mood and needs.

How to create a process which can execute concurrently with respect to java process [duplicate]

I am working on a program written in Java which, for some actions, launches external programs using user-configured command lines. Currently it uses Runtime.exec() and does not retain the Process reference (the launched programs are either a text editor or archive utility, so no need for the system in/out/err streams).
There is a minor problem with this though, in that when the Java program exits, it doesn't really quit until all the launched programs are exited.
I would greatly prefer it if the launched programs were completely independent of the JVM which launched them.
The target operating system is multiple, with Windows, Linux and Mac being the minimum, but any GUI system with a JVM is really what is desired (hence the user configurability of the actual command lines).
Does anyone know how to make the launched program execute completely independently of the JVM?
Edit in response to a comment
The launch code is as follows. The code may launch an editor positioned at a specific line and column, or it may launch an archive viewer. Quoted values in the configured command line are treated as ECMA-262 encoded, and are decoded and the quotes stripped to form the desired exec parameter.
The launch occurs on the EDT.
static Throwable launch(String cmd, File fil, int lin, int col) throws Throwable {
String frs[][]={
{ "$FILE$" ,fil.getAbsolutePath().replace('\\','/') },
{ "$LINE$" ,(lin>0 ? Integer.toString(lin) : "") },
{ "$COLUMN$",(col>0 ? Integer.toString(col) : "") },
};
String[] arr; // array of parsed tokens (exec(cmd) does not handle quoted values)
cmd=TextUtil.replace(cmd,frs,true,"$$","$");
arr=(String[])ArrayUtil.removeNulls(TextUtil.stringComponents(cmd,' ',-1,true,true,true));
for(int xa=0; xa<arr.length; xa++) {
if(TextUtil.isQuoted(arr[xa],true)) {
arr[xa]=TextDecode.ecma262(TextUtil.stripQuotes(arr[xa]));
}
}
log.println("Launching: "+cmd);
Runtime.getRuntime().exec(arr);
return null;
}
This appears to be happening only when the program is launched from my IDE. I am closing this question since the problem exists only in my development environment; it is not a problem in production. From the test program in one of the answers, and further testing I have conducted I am satisfied that it is not a problem that will be seen by any user of the program on any platform.

There is a parent child relation between your processes and you have to break that.
For Windows you can try:
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd /c start editor.exe");
For Linux the process seem to run detached anyway, no nohup necessary.
I tried it with gvim, midori and acroread.
import java.io.IOException;
public class Exec {
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("/usr/bin/acroread");
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
System.out.println("Finished");
}
}
I think it is not possible to to it with Runtime.exec in a platform independent way.
for POSIX-Compatible system:
Runtime.getRuntime().exec(new String[]{"/bin/sh", "-c", "your command"}).waitFor();

I have some observations that may help other people facing similar issue.
When you use Runtime.getRuntime().exec() and then you ignore the java.lang.Process handle you get back (like in the code from original poster), there is a chance that the launched process may hang.
I have faced this issue in Windows environment and traced the problem to the stdout and stderr streams. If the launched application is writing to these streams, and the buffer for these stream fills up then the launched application may appear to hang when it tries to write to the streams. The solutions are:
Capture the Process handle and empty out the streams continually - but if you want to terminate the java application right after launching the process then this is not a feasible solution
Execute the process call as cmd /c <<process>> (this is only for Windows environment).
Suffix the process command and redirect the stdout and stderr streams to nul using 'command > nul 2>&1'

It may help if you post a test section of minimal code needed to reproduce the problem. I tested the following code on Windows and a Linux system.
public class Main {
/**
* #param args the command line arguments
*/
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
Runtime.getRuntime().exec(args[0]);
}
}
And tested with the following on Linux:
java -jar JustForTesting.jar /home/monceaux/Desktop/__TMP/test.sh
where test.sh looks like:
#!/bin/bash
ping -i 20 localhost
as well as this on Linux:
java -jar JustForTesting.jar gedit
And tested this on Windows:
java -jar JustForTesting.jar notepad.exe
All of these launched their intended programs, but the Java application had no problems exiting. I have the following versions of Sun's JVM as reported by java -version :
Windows: 1.6.0_13-b03
Linux: 1.6.0_10-b33
I have not had a chance to test on my Mac yet. Perhaps there is some interaction occuring with other code in your project that may not be clear. You may want to try this test app and see what the results are.

You want to launch the program in the background, and separate it from the parent. I'd consider nohup(1).

I suspect this would require a actual process fork. Basically, the C equivalent of what you want is:
pid_t id = fork();
if(id == 0)
system(command_line);
The problem is you can't do a fork() in pure Java. What I would do is:
Thread t = new Thread(new Runnable()
{
public void run()
{
try
{
Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command);
}
catch(IOException e)
{
// Handle error.
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
});
t.start();
That way the JVM still won't exit, but no GUI and only a limited memory footprint will remain.

I tried everything mentioned here but without success. Main parent Java process can't quit until the quit of subthread even with cmd /c start and redirecting streams tu nul.
Only one reliable solution for me is this:
try {
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("psexec -i cmd /c start cmd.cmd");
}
catch (Exception e) {
// handle it
}
I know that this is not clear, but this small utility from SysInternals is very helpful and proven. Here is the link.

One way I can think of is to use Runtime.addShutdownHook to register a thread that kills off all the processes (you'd need to retain the process objects somewhere of course).
The shutdown hook is only called when the JVM exits so it should work fine.
A little bit of a hack but effective.

ProcessBuilder getOutputStream and interacting with processes

I am having trouble interacting with a process using getOutputStream. Here is my code:
Process p = null;
ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder("/home/eric/this.sh");
pb.directory(new File("/home/eric/"));
p = pb.start();
InputStream in = null;
OutputStream outS = null;
StringBuffer commandResult = new StringBuffer();
String line = null;
int readInt;
int returnVal = p.waitFor();
in = p.getInputStream();
while ((readInt = in.read()) != -1)
commandResult.append((char)readInt);
outS = (BufferedOutputStream) p.getOutputStream();
outS.write("Y".getBytes());
outS.close();
System.out.println(commandResult.toString());
in.close();
Here is the output:
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
libmono2.0-cil libmono-data-tds2.0-cil libmono-system-data2.0-cil
libdbus-glib1.0-cil librsvg2-2.18-cil libvncserver0 libsqlite0
libmono-messaging2.0-cil libmono-system-messaging2.0-cil
libmono-system-data-linq2.0-cil libmono-sqlite2.0-cil
libmono-system-web2.0-cil libwnck2.20-cil libgnome-keyring1.0-cil
libdbus1.0-cil libmono-wcf3.0-cil libgdiplus libgnomedesktop2.20-cil
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
firefox-globalmenu
Suggested packages:
firefox-gnome-support firefox-kde-support latex-xft-fonts
The following NEW packages will be installed:
firefox firefox-globalmenu
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded.
Need to get 15.2 MB of archives.
After this operation, 30.6 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Abort
this.sh simply runs "gksudo apt-get install firefox"
I don't know why it is Aborting and not taking my input "Y" thanks.

There are several problems.
First: gksudo(1) does some dirty, non-standard tricks with the standard input and standard output of the commands it starts. It fails horrible. A good example is this command line:
$ echo foo | gksudo -g cat
I would expect any output and the termination of the cat as soon as the echo has delivered the data. Nope. Both gksudo and cat hang around forever. No output.
Your usecase would be
echo y |gksudo apt-get install ....
and this will not work also. As long as this is not solved, you can forget to do any remote control if the started program requires any user input.
Second: As already pointed out by Roger waitFor() waits for the termination of the command. This will not happen any time soon without any user input and with the gksudo problem.
Third After shoving waitFor down a bit there is the next blocker: You wait for the complete output of the process up to and including the EOF. This will not happen anytime soon (see "first" and "second").
Fourth Only after the process is already dead twice (see "second" and "third") it might get some input - your Y (which might also need an additional \n).
Instead of solving this bunch of problems there might be a better and much easier way: Don't try to control apt-get install with standard input. Just give it some appropriate options which automatically "answers" your questions. A quick man apt-get turns up some candidates:
-y, --yes, --assume-yes
--force-yes
--trivial-only
--no-remove
--no-upgrade
See the manual for details.
I think this is the better and more stable way.
PS: Right now I'm pi*** o*** gksudo quite a bit, so excuse the rant above.

Running a program from within Java code

What is the simplest way to call a program from with a piece of Java code? (The program I want to run is aiSee and it can be run from command line or from Windows GUI; and I am on Vista but the code will also be run on Linux systems).

Take a look at Process and Runtime classes. Keep in mind that what you are trying to accomplish is probably not platform independent.
Here is a little piece of code that might be helpful:
public class YourClass
{
public static void main(String args[])
throws Exception
{
Runtime rt = Runtime.getRuntime();
Process proc = rt.exec("name_of_your_application.exe");
int exitVal = proc.exitValue();
System.out.println("Process exitValue: " + exitVal);
}
}
One question in S.O. discussing similiar issues. Another one. And another one.

You can get a runtime instance using Runtime.getRuntime() and call the runtime's exec method, with the command to execute the program as an argument.
For example:
Runtime runTime = Runtime.getRuntime ();
Process proc = rt.exec("iSee.exe");
You can also capture the output of the program by using getting the InputStream from the process.

The difficulty you will run into is how to get the application to know the path. You may want to use an xml or config file, but if you use this link, it should explain how to run a file:
http://www.javacoffeebreak.com/faq/faq0030.html

You may also want to consider passing in some kind of argument to your program to facilitate finding the specific program you want to run.
This could be with command line arguments, properties files or system properties.