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

Granted, it is not the smaller ( from all the languages available ) but it shouldn't be that verbose.

This version is dirty. Exceptions should be handled, reading may be improved. This is just to show how a java version could start.

Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec( "cmd /c " + command );
InputStream i = p.getInputStream();
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for(  int c = 0 ; ( c =  i.read() ) > -1  ; ) {
    sb.append( ( char ) c );
}

Complete program below.

import java.io.*;

public class Test { 
    public static void main ( String [] args ) throws IOException { 
        String result = execute( args[0] );
        System.out.println( result );
    }
    private static String execute( String command ) throws IOException  { 
        Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec( "cmd /c " + command );
        InputStream i = p.getInputStream();
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        for(  int c = 0 ; ( c =  i.read() ) > -1  ; ) {
            sb.append( ( char ) c );
        }
        i.close();
        return sb.toString();
    }
}

Sample ouput ( using the type command )

C:\oreyes\samples\java\readinput>java Test "type hello.txt"
This is a sample file
with some
lines

Sample output ( dir )

 C:\oreyes\samples\java\readinput>java Test "dir"
 El volumen de la unidad C no tiene etiqueta.
 El número de serie del volumen es:

 Directorio de C:\oreyes\samples\java\readinput

12/16/2008  05:51 PM              .
12/16/2008  05:51 PM              ..
12/16/2008  05:50 PM                42 hello.txt
12/16/2008  05:38 PM             1,209 Test.class
12/16/2008  05:47 PM               682 Test.java
               3 archivos          1,933 bytes
               2 dirs            840 bytes libres

Try any

java Test netstat
java Test tasklist
java Test "taskkill /pid 416"

EDIT

I must admit I'm not 100% sure this is the "best" way to do it. Feel free to post references and/or code to show how can it be improved or what's wrong with this.