Hi all, Something is needed to ease the running of command line programs in Java. Several issues appear when using the official SDK Runtime#exec() and Process: multiple exec() method to chose from, quotes handling, lack of shell, no timeout management, input/output management…
Ant first solved the problem by creating a Commandline class some years ago and a couple of helper classes to provide more functionality on top of Runtime.exec(). These classes have been copied and sligthty forked in several projects including plexus, maven2, cruisecontrol. To me that clearly denotates its usefulness. So why not putting these classes available in a standalone library? Note: this is similar to the general idea Vincent Massol had ([1]) on reusable ant tasks, with a focus on command line and process execution. As it is not practical to discuss this accross several mailing lists, I wrote a proposal on my blog (http://www.coffeebreaks.org/blogs/?p=8). If you want to help, please send me a mail or better write a comment on the blog entry. If there are enough interest, I will create a dedicated list. Cheers, Jerome [1] http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/vmassol/archives/think_tank.html#001036_id_love_reusable_ant_tasks
