Re: Inheriting stderr in Runtime.exec() child

From:
"John B. Matthews" <nospam@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.help
Date:
Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:46:30 -0400
Message-ID:
<nospam-4C7D59.14463011062009@news.aioe.org>
In article
<69ea46f9-0deb-4004-bcd1-db847ad47647@o30g2000vbc.googlegroups.com>,
 Alexandre Ferrieux <alexandre.ferrieux@gmail.com> wrote:

[...]

However, in some cases I would like the 2 (stderr) of the child to
just inherit the caller's, as in most other environments
(C,Tcl,sh,csh...), so that stderr logging naturally ends up in the
caller's log file.

How do I do that ?

(As a workaround, I've started a thread reading from the
getErrorStream () pipe and writing to System.err, but that's
inefficient and inelegant).


A separate thread? I think System.err _is_ the inherited stderr stream,
for example:

<console>
$ java ExecTest 1>/dev/null 2>temp ; cat temp
ls: foo: No such file or directory
Exit value: 1
</console>

<code>
import java.io.*;

/** @author John B. Matthews */
class ExecTest {

    public static void main (String[] args) {
        String s;
        try {
            Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(
                "ls . foo");
            // read from the process's stdout
            BufferedReader stdout = new BufferedReader (
                new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()));
            while ((s = stdout.readLine()) != null) {
                System.out.println(s);
            }
            // read from the process's stderr
            BufferedReader stderr = new BufferedReader (
                new InputStreamReader(p.getErrorStream()));
            while ((s = stderr.readLine()) != null) {
                System.err.println(s);
            }
            p.getInputStream().close();
            p.getOutputStream().close();
            p.getErrorStream().close();
            System.err.println("Exit value: " + p.waitFor());
        }
        catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}
</code>

I usually keep stout and sterr separate, but I see ProcessBuilder makes
it easy to merge them:

[1]<http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/ProcessBuilder.html>

--
John B. Matthews
trashgod at gmail dot com
<http://sites.google.com/site/drjohnbmatthews>

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