Difference between ProcessBuilder and Runtime.exec()

Question

I'm trying to execute an external command from java code, but there's a difference I've noticed between Runtime.getRuntime().exec(...) and new ProcessBuilder(...).start().

When using Runtime:

Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(installation_path + 
                                       uninstall_path + 
                                       uninstall_command + 
                                       uninstall_arguments);
p.waitFor();

the exitValue is 0 and the command is terminated ok.

However, with ProcessBuilder:

Process p = (new ProcessBuilder(installation_path +    
                                 uninstall_path +
                                 uninstall_command,
                                 uninstall_arguments)).start();
p.waitFor();

the exit value is 1001 and the command terminates in the middle, although waitFor returns.

What should I do to fix the problem with ProcessBuilder?

Answer 1

The various overloads of Runtime.getRuntime().exec(...) take either an array of strings or a single string. The single-string overloads of exec() will tokenise the string into an array of arguments, before passing the string array onto one of the exec() overloads that takes a string array. The ProcessBuilder constructors, on the other hand, only take a varargs array of strings or a List of strings, where each string in the array or list is assumed to be an individual argument. Either way, the arguments obtained are then joined up into a string that is passed to the OS to execute.

So, for example, on Windows,

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("C:\DoStuff.exe -arg1 -arg2");

will run a DoStuff.exe program with the two given arguments. In this case, the command-line gets tokenised and put back together. However,

ProcessBuilder b = new ProcessBuilder("C:\DoStuff.exe -arg1 -arg2");

will fail, unless there happens to be a program whose name is DoStuff.exe -arg1 -arg2 in C:\. This is because there's no tokenisation: the command to run is assumed to have already been tokenised. Instead, you should use

ProcessBuilder b = new ProcessBuilder("C:\DoStuff.exe", "-arg1", "-arg2");

or alternatively

List<String> params = java.util.Arrays.asList("C:\DoStuff.exe", "-arg1", "-arg2");
ProcessBuilder b = new ProcessBuilder(params);