Starting other Applications with Java

Question

Is it possible to start other application that are installed on the system with my java app and pass a file as a parameter to them? I have a client which receives videos from a server and I want my client program to start, lets say the VLC player with the file that I received. How do I manage to do that?

Answer 1

Use Desktop#open(). It will launch the platform default associated application to open the given file.

File file = new File("/absolute/path/to/file.vlc");
Desktop.getDesktop().open(file);

No need to hassle with Runtime#exec() or ProcessBuilder for which you would have to add platform detection and to write platform specific logics for.

Answer 2

Quite simply:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("vlc [arguments]"); //Write all arguments as you would in your shell.

Make sure you catch all relevant exceptions