Process

public abstract class Process
extends Object

The start() and Runtime.exec methods create a native process and return an instance of a subclass of Process that can be used to control the process and obtain information about it. The class Process provides methods for performing input from the process, performing output to the process, waiting for the process to complete, checking the exit status of the process, and destroying (killing) the process.

The methods that create processes may not work well for special processes on certain native platforms, such as native windowing processes, daemon processes, Win16/DOS processes on Microsoft Windows, or shell scripts.

By default, the created subprocess does not have its own terminal or console. All its standard I/O (i.e. stdin, stdout, stderr) operations will be redirected to the parent process, where they can be accessed via the streams obtained using the methods getOutputStream(), getInputStream(), and getErrorStream(). The parent process uses these streams to feed input to and get output from the subprocess. Because some native platforms only provide limited buffer size for standard input and output streams, failure to promptly write the input stream or read the output stream of the subprocess may cause the subprocess to block, or even deadlock.

The subprocess is not killed when there are no more references to the Process object, but rather the subprocess continues executing asynchronously.

There is no requirement that a process represented by a Process object execute asynchronously or concurrently with respect to the Java process that owns the Process object.

As of 1.5, start() is the preferred way to create a Process.

Summary

Inherited methods

From class java.lang.Object Object clone() Creates and returns a copy of this object. boolean equals(Object obj) Indicates whether some other object is "equal to" this one. void finalize() Called by the garbage collector on an object when garbage collection determines that there are no more references to the object. final Class<?> getClass() Returns the runtime class of this Object. int hashCode() Returns a hash code value for the object. final void notify() Wakes up a single thread that is waiting on this object's monitor. final void notifyAll() Wakes up all threads that are waiting on this object's monitor. String toString() Returns a string representation of the object. final void wait(long millis, int nanos) Causes the current thread to wait until another thread invokes the notify() method or the notifyAll() method for this object, or some other thread interrupts the current thread, or a certain amount of real time has elapsed. final void wait(long millis) Causes the current thread to wait until either another thread invokes the notify() method or the notifyAll() method for this object, or a specified amount of time has elapsed. final void wait() Causes the current thread to wait until another thread invokes the notify() method or the notifyAll() method for this object.

Public constructors

Process ()

Public methods

void destroy ()

int exitValue ()

InputStream getErrorStream ()

InputStream getInputStream ()

OutputStream getOutputStream ()

int waitFor ()