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Java Runtime.exec() works for some command but not others [duplicate]

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Why does Runtime.exec(String) work for some but not all commands?
(1 answer)
Closed 10 months ago.
I am doing an exercise related to Runtime.exec(), I understand that Runtime.exec is not a shell interpreter, that's why I execute "bash -c 'command'" instead, but for some reason, I can execute commands like ls bash -c 'ls' but not echo or redirection or multiple commands. These does not work:
bash -c 'echo 1234'
bash -c 'ls > abc'
bash -c 'ls;id'
bash -c 'ls -al'
Here is my java code:
import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;
public class runtime {
public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception{
String cmd = args[0];
System.out.println(cmd);
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(cmd);
OutputStream os = p.getOutputStream();
InputStream in = p.getInputStream();
DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(in);
String disr = dis.readLine();
while ( disr != null ) {
System.out.println("Out: " + disr);
disr = dis.readLine();
}
}
}
I run the above commands with the syntax:
java runtime "bash -c 'command'"
This works:
$ java runtime "bash -c 'ls'"
bash -c 'ls'
Out: Main.class
Out: Main.java
Out: runtime.class
Out: runtime.java
I am using openjdk 11.0.15 on Ubuntu 20.04 and zsh.
Can anyone tell me why Runtime doesn't work in this case? Thank you!

Because of shell parsing.
These are all concepts that the OS just does not have:
The concept of 'every space separates one argument from another (and the command from the list of arguments'). The concept that a single string can possibly run anything, in fact; at the OS level that's just not what the 'run this thing' API looks like. When you type commands on the command prompt, your shell app is 'interpreting' these strings into a command execution request.
The concept of figuring out that bash means /bin/bash, i.e. $PATH resolution.
The concept that *.txt is supposed to refer to all files that ends in .txt.
The concept that $FOO should be replaced with the value of the environment variable 'FOO'
The concept that ; separates 2 commands, and it's supposed to run both.
The concept that single and double quotes escape things. "Escape things" implies that things can cause interpretation to happen. The OS interprets nothing, therefore there's nothing to escape. Obvious, then, that the OS doesn't know what ' is, or ".
That >foo means: Please set the standard output of the spawned process such that it sends it all to file 'foo'.
In windows shells, that # in front of the command means 'do not echo the command itself'. This and many other things are shellisms: /bin/bash does that, maybe /bin/zsh does something else. Windows's built in shell thing definitely is quite different from bash!
Instead, an OS simply wants you to provide it a full path to an executable along with a list of strings, and pick targets for standard in, standard out, and standard err. It does no processing on any of that, just starts the process you named, and passes it the strings verbatim.
You're sort of half there, as you already figured out that e.g. ls >foo cannot work if you execute it on its own, but it can work if you tell bash to execute it. As ALL of that stuff in the above list? Your shell does that.
It gets more complicated: Turning *.txt into foo.txt bar.txt is a task of bash and friends, e.g. if you attempted to run: ls '*.txt' it does not work. But on windows, it's not the shell's job; the shell just passes it verbatim to dir, and it is the command's job to undo it. What a mess, right? Executing things is hard!
So, what's wrong here? Two things:
Space splitting isn't working out.
Quote application isn't being done.
When you write:
bash -c 'ls >foo'
in a bash shell, bash has to first split this up, into a command, and a list of arguments. Bash does so as follows:
Command: bash
arg1: -c
arg2: ls >foo
It knows that ls >foo isn't 2 arguments because, effectively, "space" is the bash operator for: "... and here is the next argument", and with quotes (either single or double), the space becomes a literal space instead of the '... move to next argument ...' operator.
In your code, you ask bash to run java, and then java to run bash. So, bash first does:
cmd: java
arg1: bash -c 'ls >foo'
With the same logic at work. Your java app then takes that entire string (that's args[0]: "bash -c 'ls >foo'"), and you then feed it to a method you should never use: Runtime.exec(). Always use ProcessBuilder, and always use the list-based form of it.
Given that you're using the bad method, you're now asking java to do this splitting thing. After all, if you just tell the OS verbatim, please run "bash -c 'ls >foo'", the OS dutifully reports: "I'm sorry, but file ./bash -c ;ls >foo' does not exist", because it does not processing at all". This is unwieldy so java's exec() method is a disaster you should never use: Because people are confused about this, it tries to do some extremely basic processing, except every OS and shell is different, java does not know this, so it does a really bad job at it.
Hence, do not use it.
In this case, java doesn't realize that those quotes mean it shouldn't split, so java tells the OS:
Please run:
cmd: /bin/bash (java DOES do path lookup; but you should avoid this, do not use relative path names, you should always write them out in full)
arg1: -c
arg2: 'ls
arg3: >foo'
and now you understand why this is just going completely wrong.
Instead, you want java to tell the OS:
cmd: /bin/bash
arg1: -c
arg2: ls >foo
Note: ls >foo needs to be one argument, and NOTHING in the argument should be containing quotes, anywhere. The reason you write:
/bin/bash -c 'ls >foo'
In bash, is because you [A] want bash not to treat that space between ls and >foo as an arg separator (you want ls >foo to travel to /bin/bash as one argument), and [B] that you want >foo to just be sent to the bash you're spawning and not to be treated as 'please redirect the output to file foo' at the current shell level.
Runtime.exec isn't a shell, so the quotes stuff? Runtime.exec has no idea.
This means more generally your plan of "I shall write an app where the entire argument you pass to it is just run" is oversimplified and can never work unless you write an entire quotes and escaper analyser for it.
An easy way out is to take the input, write it out to a shell script on disk, set the exec flag on it, and always run /bin/bash -c /path/to/script-you-just-wrote, sidestepping any need to attempt to parse anything in java: Let bash do it.
The ONE weird bizarro thing I cannot explain, is that literally passing 'ls' to /bin/bash -c, with quotes intact, DOES work and runs ls as normal, but 'ls *' does not, perhaps because now bash thinks you want executable file /bin/ls * which obviously does not exist (a star cannot be in a file name, or at least, that's not the ls executable, and it's not an alias for the ls built-in). At any rate, you want to pass ls without the quotes.
Let's try it!
import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;
public class runtime {
public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception{
ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder();
pb.command("/bin/bash", "-c", "echo 1234");
// pb.command("/bin/bash", "-c", "'echo 1234'");
Process p = pb.start();
OutputStream os = p.getOutputStream();
InputStream in = p.getInputStream();
DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(in);
String disr = dis.readLine();
while ( disr != null ) {
System.out.println("Out: " + disr);
disr = dis.readLine();
}
int errCode = p.waitFor();
System.out.println("Process exit code: " + errCode);
}
}
The above works fine. Replace the .command line with the commented out variant and you'll notice it does not work at all, and you get an error. On my mac I get a '127' error; perhaps this is bash reporting back: I could not find the command you were attempting to execute. 0 is what you're looking for when you invoke waitFor: That's the code for 'no errors'.

Using Java's getRuntime.exec() to Run a Linux Shell Command: How?

Below is a python script that executes a linux bash command "echo Hello World > ./output"
import os
os.system("bash -c \"echo Hello World > ./output\"");
I am trying to do the same with Java. Below is my best effort, following the instructions I found here: Want to invoke a linux shell command from Java
import java.io.IOException;
public class callCommand {
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(
new String[]{"bash","-c",
"\"echo Hello World > ./output\""});
} catch(IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
It compiles without issue, and runs without complaint, but no output file is generated.

The extra quotes around echo ... should be removed:
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(new String[]{
"bash", "-c",
"echo Hello World > ./output"
});
The python version needs extra quotes to tell the underlying system that echo Hello World > ./output is a single argument. The java version explicitly specifies arguments as separate strings, so it doesn't need those quotes.
Also, your version doesn't "run without complaint", you just don't see the complaints, because you don't read the error stream of the created process.

The standard input, output and error streams to/from a system process started from Java are accessed through the methods getOutputStream(), getInputStream() and getErrorStream() of Process.
I recommend you to get the error output produced by your system process:
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(...);
InputStream input=p.getErrorStream();
do
{
n=input.read(...);
}
while (n>=0);
Be careful: For your actual problem, this would be enough. But for a process which produces a longer error/output, you need to perform the reading of the standard error/output in a separate thread. If not, the system process would block when the error/output buffer is full, and wait till it is externally consumed, and if you place the reading loop just after the process is executed, it will never execute and so, the program will get into a deadlock.

Runtime exec lp command print success

I have to print a PDF file in java program and make sure it's printed successfully, else throw exception.
My Code is:
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("lp -c -n 1 -d 1.2.3.4 abc.pdf");
System.out.println(p.waitFor());
Above code prints 0, but it only confirms that job is submitted fine, how to make sure that it's printed also.
Is there any other way to do this?

Run lpstat (after lp) and capture the process output.

background process in java listening to stdin

I have to make a java program that when user enters 0 it should exit. no problem writing in java code.
int cmd = read();
System.out.println("got command : " + cmd);
if (cmd == 48) { // ASCII code for 0
System.exit(0);
I want to run this process using start-stop script in linux. I am also being able to do that using & or nohup
case "$1" in
'start')
if [ -f myfifo ]; then
rm myfifo
fi
mkfifo myfifo
cat > myfifo &
echo $! > myfifo-cat-pid
java -jar myjar.jar >/dev/null 2>&1 0<myfifo &
echo "Started process: "$!
;;
'stop')
echo 0 > myfifo
echo "Stopped process: "
rm myfifo
;;
esac
My problem is as soon as i run this process it read input -1. While I want to read from stdinput when somthing is echoed to it explicitly i.e. stop is called. Simply i need a program to be closed by shell script explicitly. I have tried hard. Help me.
Edit :
I just want to close the program when user press q or any such event and dont want infinite loop in code. Any other approach like listening to other events will also help if possible. My code should not be polling for event. I have tried Jnotify which watch a directory and rise an event when file is created or deleted in that directory. But hard luck they dont have support for SunOS. :(

Well, in fact the fifo files seems not behave exactly as you imagine.
The read() command is not blocking on a pipe. You should loop until you get data:
try {
bis = new BufferedInputStream(System.in);
while (true) {
byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];
if (bis.available() > 0) {
bis.read(buffer, 0, bis.available());
// do some clever thing
} else {
try {
Thread.sleep(50);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
} catch (IOException e) {
// it failed...
}
This will try to read and if there is nothing, then it will wait for 50 ms.
M.

Since you have no data in the pipe yet, read() sees the end of the stream and because of this it returns -1. Call available() before reading from the stream to be sure that there is information in it.

If you use set -m at the top of your shell script (hence enabling forcefully job control), you should see a consistent behavior.

When you background a command in a script the stdin of that command gets implicitly redirected from /dev/null.
# test by executing a script with ...
- cat > myfifo & lsof -p $!
+ cat 0<&0 > myfifo & lsof -p $!

Execute Unix system command from JAVA problem

I am facing a weird issue with executing a system command from JAVA code.
Actually i want to get the Mac OSX system information from my JAVA App.
For that im using
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("system_profiler -detailLevel full");
This is working fine.If i print the output,it is cool.
But i want to write this information to a plist file for future use.For that im using the -xml argument of system_profiler.like,
String cmd = "system_profiler -detailLevel full -xml > "+System.getProperty( "user.home" )+"/sysinfo.plist";
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(cmd);
Basically this should create a plist file in the current users home directory.
But this seems to be not writing anything to file.
Am i missing something here ?

My Java is more than rusty, so please be gentle. ;-)
Runtime.exec() does not automatically use the shell to execute the command you passed, so the IO redirection is not doing anything.
If you just use:
"/bin/sh -c system_profiler -detailLevel full > path/file.plist"
Then the string will be tokenized into:
{ "/bin/sh", "-c", "system_profiler", "-detailLevel", "full", ">", "path/file.plist" }
Which also wouldn't work, because -c only expects a single argument.
Try this instead:
String[] cmd = { "/bin/sh", "-c", "system_profiler -detailLevel full > path/file.plist" };
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime.exec(cmd);
Of course, you could also just read the output of your Process instance using Process.getInputStream() and write that into the file you want; thus skip the shell, IO redirection, etc. altogether.

Christian.K is absolutely correct. Here is a complete example:
public class Hello {
static public void main (String[] args) {
try {
String[] cmds = {
"/bin/sh", "-c", "ls -l *.java | tee tmp.out"};
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec (cmds);
p.waitFor ();
System.out.println ("Done.");
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println ("Err: " + e.getMessage());
}
}
}
If you weren't using a pipe (|) or redirect (>), then you'd be OK with String cmd = "ls -l *.java", as in your original command.
If you actually wanted to see any of the output in your Java console window, then you'd ALSO need to call Process.getInputStream().
Here's a good link:
Running system commands in Java applications