Question

I have a java program that is supposed to run a bat file, and then exit with a success code 0.

The code essentially looks like this

Runtime.exec(....);

System.exit(0);

99.8% of the time, this works perfectly. But very sporadically the bat file won’t get run.

My theory is that on certain systems, the Runtime.exec can’t finish its spawning before the System.exit runs. Is this likely/possible?

I looked at the source of Runtime.exec but it drops into native code to do the interesting stuff.

EDIT

Based on the answers so far, I should state that the .bat file executes another java process using javaw. I can confirm that the 1st java process ending does NOT kill the 2nd one run in the bat file.

Is it possible that when the problem happens the bat file hadn’t spawned the 2nd java process before the System.exit occurred? Perhaps it is not a Runtime.exec problem after all?

EDIT2

I cannot wait for the 2nd process to end, it could run indefinitely and my 1st process must exit.

Answer 1

You are creating a child process that will terminate with its parent. You must use Process.waitFor in Java to ensure that Java process waits for the bat process to finish.