Execute commands in CMD on Windows with Java code

Nice question, you can in fact call cmd as a new process and use standard input and standard output to process data.

The tricky part is knowing when the stream from a command has ended.

To do so I used a string echoed right after the command (dir && echo _end_).

In practice I think it would be better to simply start a process for each task.

public class RunCMD {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            Process exec = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd");
            OutputStream outputStream = exec.getOutputStream();
            InputStream inputStream = exec.getInputStream();
            PrintStream printStream = new PrintStream(outputStream);
            BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream,"utf-8"));
            printStream.println("chcp 65001");
            printStream.flush();
            printStream.println("dir && echo _end_");
            printStream.flush();


            for(String line=reader.readLine();line!=null;line=reader.readLine()){
                System.out.println(line);
                if(line.equals("_end_")){
                    break;
                }
            }

            printStream.println("exit");
            printStream.flush();

            for(String line=reader.readLine();line!=null;line=reader.readLine()){
                System.out.println(line);
            }

        } catch (IOException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

}

try this

    Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("ps -ef");

found it at http://alvinalexander.com/java/edu/pj/pj010016