Making a system call that returns the stdout output as a string

Question

Perl and PHP do this with backticks. For example,

$output = `ls`;

Returns a directory listing. A similar function, system(\"foo\")

Answer 1

Years ago I wrote a plugin for jEdit that interfaced to a native application. This is what I used to get the streams off the running executable. Only thing left to do is while((String s = stdout.readLine())!=null){...}:

/* File:    IOControl.java
 *
 * created: 10 July 2003
 * author:  dsm
 */
package org.jpop.io;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.PrintStream;

/**
 *  Controls the I/O for a process. When using the std[in|out|err] streams, they must all be put on
 *  different threads to avoid blocking!
 *
 * @author     dsm
 * @version    1.5
 */
public class IOControl extends Object {
    private Process process;
    private BufferedReader stdout;
    private BufferedReader stderr;
    private PrintStream stdin;

    /**
     *  Constructor for the IOControl object
     *
     * @param  process  The process to control I/O for
     */
    public IOControl(Process process) {
        this.process = process;
        this.stdin = new PrintStream(process.getOutputStream());
        this.stdout = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getInputStream()));
        this.stderr = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getErrorStream()));
    }

    /**
     *  Gets the stdin attribute of the IOControl object
     *
     * @return    The stdin value
     */
    public PrintStream getStdin() {
        return this.stdin;
    }

    /**
     *  Gets the stdout attribute of the IOControl object
     *
     * @return    The stdout value
     */
    public BufferedReader getStdout() {
        return this.stdout;
    }

    /**
     *  Gets the stderr attribute of the IOControl object
     *
     * @return    The stderr value
     */
    public BufferedReader getStderr() {
        return this.stderr;
    }

    /**
     *  Gets the process attribute of the IOControl object. To monitor the process (as opposed to
     *  just letting it run by itself) its necessary to create a thread like this: 
     *. IOControl ioc;
     *.
     *. new Thread(){
     *.     public void run(){
     *.         while(true){    // only necessary if you want the process to respawn
     *.             try{
     *.                 ioc = new IOControl(Runtime.getRuntime().exec("procname"));
     *.                 // add some code to handle the IO streams
     *.                 ioc.getProcess().waitFor();
     *.             }catch(InterruptedException ie){
     *.                 // deal with exception
     *.             }catch(IOException ioe){
     *.                 // deal with exception
     *.             }
     *.
     *.             // a break condition can be included here to terminate the loop
     *.         }               // only necessary if you want the process to respawn
     *.     }
     *. }.start();
     *  
     *
     * @return    The process value
     */
    public Process getProcess() {
        return this.process;
    }
}