Run external program concurrently and communicate with it through stdin / stdout

Question

I want to be able to run an external program concurrently with my Java code, i.e. I want to start the program, then return control to the calling method while keeping the external program running at the same time. The Java code will then keep generating input and send it to the external program and receive output back.

I don't want to keep loading the external program as it has very high overhead. What is the best way to accomplish this? Thanks!

Answer 1

Have a look at ProcessBuilder. Once you've set up the ProcessBuilder and executed start you'll have a handle to a Process to which you can feed input and read output.

Here's a snippet to get you started:

ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder("/bin/bash");
Process proc = pb.start();

// Start reading from the program
final Scanner in = new Scanner(proc.getInputStream());
new Thread() {
    public void run() {
        while (in.hasNextLine())
            System.out.println(in.nextLine());
    }
}.start();

// Write a few commands to the program.
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(proc.getOutputStream());
out.println("touch hello1");
out.flush();

out.println("touch hello2");
out.flush();

out.println("ls -la hel*");
out.flush();

out.close();

Output:

-rw-r--r-- 1 aioobe aioobe 0 2011-04-08 08:29 hello1
-rw-r--r-- 1 aioobe aioobe 0 2011-04-08 08:29 hello2