Using a thread to capture process output

Question

I am using a thread to capture stream output from a process, and then outputting that stream to the eclipse console. The question I have is when to terminate the thread that

Answer 1

You need to use Process.waitFor() to wait for process completion.

Additionally, you need to consume stdout and stderr concurrently in order to avoid blocking and a possible process hang. Consequently you need two threads to read these streams, and to continue reading whilst the streams are available.

See this Javaworld article for more info and a StreamGobbler implementation to consume the stdout/err.