execute an external command in java

Question

Is there a way to execute a command in java that doesn\'t suffer from the startup overhead (slowness) of using ProcessBuilder?

More detail: I am using im4java which

Answer 1

This is not recommended, but you could write a JNI library to do the same thing that ProcessBuilder is doing. Perhaps yours would be faster, but I wouldn't count on it, plus you would lose cross-platform compatibility.

How slow are we talking here? I'm using ProcessBuilder myself for running Git commands (haven't had a chance to look into JGit yet), and it seems snappy enough. You may have better luck on Linux, as the overhead may actually be in Windows heavyweight process creation.

Answer 2

Runtime.getRuntime().exec(...)  

can be used to run an external command. You can turn your List into a command array or a string to pass to exec().