We Keep Coding

How to get command prompt output in java?

How to get the output of the command prompt which means i have opend a command prompt like this.
Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd /c start cmd.exe /K \"C:\\Editor\\editorTemp.exe\"");
i can not get the cmd output like this
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getInputStream()));
String line = null;
while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(line);
}
So how can i get the command prompt output ?

This is not Java question. Basically what you doing is running Java (Java Main Process A) and from it starting another process (Windows CMD B). This is fine and you can get input/output streams of this process (B) in Java(A).
However this process (B) starts another process (again Windows CMD C) with its own standard input/output. This process has nothing common with processes A&B and uses Windows' standard Input/Output streams. So, there are no connections between A and C.
I'm not sure but I think there are some ways to run Windows CMD with different or not standard IO. Maybe something like this will work:
cmd <tty >tty
but there is no tty in Windows. Pragmatically you can do this as described here - Creating a Child Process with Redirected Input and Output but that would not work for regular CMD.
Nevertheless it became even more problematic when you start your own process from the editorTemp.exe (process D). D has even more disconnection with process A. And all for what? What don't you simply start process D directly from A and have full control on the IO streams and process itself?
Here is good example how to do so.

Your java thread is working independently of CMD call. The java code is beating the STDOUT pipe before anything is written.
If you call Process.waitFor(), it will wait until the CMD call is done. The STDOUT should be in the buffer, and then you can read it.

When you do a readLine(), your java thread is blocked until you have an actual full line or the input stream is closed.
If the program prints a partial line (without CR or LF at the end), and then waits for input, the readLine will be stuck.
So you will need to read character by character, until you think the proces has no more things to say.
See e.g. Is it possible to read from a InputStream with a timeout?

import java.util.Scanner;
Inside the main write this.
Scanner output = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.println(“Enter your name”);
String name = output.next();
If you want user to enter an int then you need to do this.
int number = output.nextInt();

Execute command from Java

I'm trying to execute a script from Java program:
public class TestCommandLine
{
public static void main (String[] args)
{
String PATH = "/path/programs/";
String command = PATH + "name_programs param1 param2";
executeCommand (command);
}
private static String executeCommand (String command)
{
StringBuffer output = new StringBuffer();
String line = "";
Process p;
try {
p = Runtime.getRuntime ().exec (command);
p.waitFor ();
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader (new InputStreamReader (p.getInputStream ()));
while ((line = reader.readLine ()) != null) {
output.append (line + "\n");
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace ();
}
return output.toString ();
}
}
there is not error, but the program does not run. I also try others solutions from stackoverflow but all of them didn't work

If you'd given your actual command to start with, this would have been much quicker.
You cannot use Process.exec to run shell-interpreted commands. Instead it executes programs directly. Thus input/output redirection (|, >, etc.) is not possible.
If you actually read the stderr (getErrorStream()) output it would probably be along the lines of "invalid argument: >".
You will either have to:
Redirect the output in Java. Read from the process's stdout (getInputStream()) and write to a FileOutputStream of some kind.
Execute a shell instead of your command directly. For example /bin/sh -c "command arg > file". The quoted section must be passed to sh as a single argument. In this case you wouldn't be able to see anything in stdout, and would have to open and read the file you just wrote to. The first option is probably more sensible.
And as pointed out elsewhere, unless your expecting a very small amount of output, you shouldn't wait for the command to exit before consuming the streams.

The only time I've done it I've used something like this:
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("foo.exe");
Have you tried that? If so, what was the error you got back?

Your command is producing output that you want to read, but you refuse to read any of it until the command has finished producing it all and has exited (not calling getInputStream() until after waitFor()).
If your command doesn't produce much output, this is OK, Java can buffer it. But if your command produces a lot of output, Java can't buffer it all, and the command gets blocked.
The operating system won't let the command write any more output because Java's buffer is full and you haven't instructed Java to empty it. So the program is blocked, and Java's waitFor() will never come back.
To solve your problem, you should call getInputStream() immediately after getting the Process object back from exec(), and you should create a new Thread that is responsible for reading the command output into your StringBuffer.
You should then waitFor() the process to finish, to see if it exited successfully, and then you can wait for the thread to get to the end of the inputstream and finish - at that point, it is safe to read through the StringBuffer with the full output from your command.

Execute external program from Java

I am trying to execute a program from the Java code. Here is my code:
public static void main(String argv[]) {
try {
String line;
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(new String[]{
"/bin/bash", "-c", "executable -o filename.txt"});
BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()));
while ((line = input.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(line);
}
input.close();
} catch (Exception err) {
err.printStackTrace();
}
}
My OS is Mac OS X 10.6.
Now, the executable I am trying to run is supposed to spit the output to filename.txt. If I take this command and run it on the terminal, it works fine and the filename.txt gets populated also. But, from my java program the file is not created.
if instead I use executable > filename.txt then the filename.txt is created but is empty. Not sure what's wrong here. The executable I am trying to run is Xtide (if that helps).
I would really appreciate any help I can get.
Thanks,

You cannot redirect output to file and read the output in java. It's one or the other. What you want is this:
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(new String[]{
"/bin/bash", "-c", "executable -o filename.txt"});
p.waitFor();
BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream("filename.txt")));
while ((line = input.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(line);
}
The main changes are:
p.waitFor(), since process execution is asynchronous, so you have to wait for it to complete.
The data is read from the file rather than from the output of the process (since this will be empty.)

The answer from mdma works (and I voted it up), but you might also want to consider the version where you do read the output stream directly from executable:
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(new String[]{
"/bin/bash", "-c", "executable"});
p.waitFor();
BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream())_;
while ((line = input.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(line);
}

Correct me if I am wrong, but the symptoms are as follows:
exec("/usr/bash", "-c", "executable > filename.txt") creates an empty file.
exec("/usr/bash", "-c", "executable -o filename.txt") does not create a file.
One or both of the above gives an exit code of 255 when you look at it.
When you run the command from the command line as executable -o filename.txt or executable > filename.txt it works as expected.
In the light of the above, I think that the most likely cause is that /bin/bash is not finding the executable when you launch it from Java. The fact that the first example does create an empty file means that /bin/bash is doing something. But if you try to run
$ unknown-command > somefile.txt
from a bash shell prompt you will get an error message saying that the command cannot be found and an empty "something.txt" file. (You would not see the error message in your Java app because it is being written to stderr, and you are not capturing it.) The reason that the empty "something.txt" file is created is that it is opened by the shell before it attempts to fork and exec the "executable".
If this is the problem, then the simple solution is to use the absolute pathname for the executable.
Also, if you are not doing any command line redirection or other shell magic, there is no need to run the executable in a new bash instance. Rather, just do this:
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("executable", "-o", filename.txt");
then wait for the process to complete and check the exit code before trying to read the file contents.

Running other programs from Java

I need to run a couple of other programs from my own Java program, basically I need to run these command line statements.
svn log --xml -v > svn.log
and
java -jar example.jar arg1 arg2
and I need to use the text outputs written to the console from these programs in my own program. I've tried Runtime.getRuntime().exec() with the svn, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything because it doesn't make a svn.log file. Also both programs need to be called in different places, the svn line needs to be called from inside one folder and the java line needs to be called from another.
Any ideas on how to go about this? If this is not possible in Java, is there a way to do it in C#?
Thanks

Here:
ProcessBuilder processbuilder
try
{
processbuilder.directory(file);
processbuilder.redirectErrorStream(true);
process = processbuilder.start();
String readLine;
BufferedReader output = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getInputStream()));
// include this too:
// BufferedReader output = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getErrorStream()));
while((readLine = output.readLine()) != null)
{
m_Logger.info(readLine);
}
process.waitFor();
}
I've used something similar. You'll actually want to do something with the readLine. I just copied and pasted from code where I didn't care what it said.

The redirection > (like the pipe |) is a shell construct and only works when you execute stuff via /bin/sh (or equivalent). So the above isn't really going to work. You could execute
/bin/sh -c "svn log --xml -v > svn.log"
and read svn.log.
Alternatively, you can read the output from the process execution and dump that to a file (if you need to dump it to a file, or just consume it directly as you read it). If you choose this route and consume stdout/stderr separately, note that when you consume the output (stdout), you need to consume stderr as well, and concurrently, otherwise buffers will block (and your spawned process) waiting for your process to consume this. See this answer for more details.

instead of piping in your command, just let it print to standard output and error output. You can access those streams from your process object that is returned from exec.

For the svn stuff use java SVNKit API.

Seeing your two commands, why don't you do it directly from Java, without executing ? You could use SVNKit for the svn part, and include directly the jars in your classpath.

Try this
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
// Execute a command with an argument that contains a space
System.out.println(args[0]);
String[]commands = new String[]{"svn", "info", args[0]};
Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(commands);
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getInputStream()));
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
String line = null;
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
builder.append(line);
builder.append(System.getProperty("line.separator"));
}
String result = builder.toString();
System.out.println(result);
}catch(Exception e){
System.out.print(e);
}
}

Java exec() does not return expected result of pipes' connected commands

I'm calling command line programs connected by pipes. All this works on Linux for sure.
My method:
protected String execCommand(String command) throws IOException {
String line = null;
if (command.length() > 0) {
Process child = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command);
InputStream lsOut = child.getInputStream();
InputStreamReader r = new InputStreamReader(lsOut);
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(r);
String readline = null;
while ((readline = in.readLine()) != null) {
line = line + readline;
}
}
return line;
}
If I'm calling some cat file | grep asd, I'm getting the expected result. But not all commands works correctly. For example with this:
cat /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l
or this:
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name" | head -n 1 | awk -F":" '{print substr($2, 2, length($2))}
the method will return null. I'm guessing this problem depends on output formatting commands like head, tail, wc, etc. How I can work around this problem and get the final result of the output?

The pipe (like redirection, or >) is a function of the shell, and so execing directly from Java won't work. You need to do something like:
/bin/sh -c "your | piped | commands | here"
which executes a shell process with the command line (including pipes) specified after the -c (in quotes).
Note also that you have to consume stdout and stderr concurrently, otherwise your spawned process will block waiting for your process to consume the output (or errors). More info here.

Everyone who uses Runtime.exec should read this.

It might be a good idea to check the error stream of the Process as well.

Still didn't found proper solution to execute piped commands with Runtime.exec, but found a workaround. I've simply wrote these scripts to separate bash files. Then Runtime.exec calls these bash scripts and gets expected result.

The quick-and-dirty thing to do would be:
command = "/bin/sh -c '" + command.replaceAll("'", "'\''") + "'"
Normally, you'll have to watch out for shell injection (i.e. someone sneaks "; rm -rf /;" into the command). But that's only an issue if part of the command can be supplied from some other user input.
The slow and painful approach would be to do the Bash piping yourself in Java. If you go down this road, you'll find out all the wonderful things that Bash gives you that's not directly available from Process.exec (pipes, redirection, compound commands, variable expansion, arithmetic evaluation, ...).
Parse the command for | characters. Be sure to watch out for || and quoted strings.
Spawn a new Process for every piped command.
Create Threads that read the output from one command and write it to the input of the next command.

Probably a little too late but for others looking for a solution, try this...
String[] cmd = {
"/bin/sh",
"-c",
"cat /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l"
};
Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(cmd);
All the best..