Question

I need a java method that will read command prompt output and store it into a String to be read into Java.

This is what I have so far but isn’t working right.

public void testGetOutput() {
    System.out.println("\n\n****This is the testGetOutput Method!****");
    String s = null;
    String query = "dir " + this.desktop;
    try {
        Runtime runtime = Runtime.getRuntime();
        InputStream input = runtime.exec("cmd /c " + query).getInputStream();
        BufferedInputStream buffer = new BufferedInputStream(input);
        BufferedReader commandResult = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(buffer));
        String line = "";
        try {
            while ((line = commandResult.readLine()) != null) {
                s += line + "\n";
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        System.out.println(s);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}//end testGetOutput()

I think the problem is when I try to change the query to be a command which will execute HandBrakeCLI.exe. Looking at my system when the program is running (but seems to have paused), it shows me that HandBrakeCLI.exe is running under a cmd window which is being run under my IDE. All that makes sense, but the HandBrakeCLI.exe doesn’t exit, so I’m guessing that’s why I can’t read the output as input to my program.

So, after that background. My big question is this: How do I get HandBrakeCLI.exe to close after it’s finished with my query so I can get its output?
Just for extra info, the only difference between the method above and the scan DVD method I have for HandBrakeCLI is the query variable is different. Like this example:

String query = "C:\Users\Kent\Desktop\HBCLI\HandBrakeCLI -t --scan -i "C:\Users\Kent\Desktop\General Conference DVDs\Sources\174th October 2004\DVD 1"; //this is actually a variable in the DVD object, but here's an example'

Oh, and by the way, when I run that query in a regular command prompt, it does exactly what I want it to, giving me all the output I desperately desire!

Here’s the original problem (I’m not sure how to resubmit a question):

I’ve been looking everywhere and can’t figure this out. I’m not sure what I’ve found is even relevant to what I want to do. I don’t have a whole lot of code for it yet, so it wont do much to put code here and I think this should be pretty simple, so I’m going to give some screenshots here. So here’s my task:

1. Scan folder which is full of ripped DVD folders (Video_TS folders with VOB files etc.) and store these folder names as the title of the DVD.

2. Scan each folder using the HandBrakeCLI and store the output to a string.

3. Regex the string to identify each title, chapter, and language.

4. Generate queries to give back to HandBrakeCLI to bulk encode each language in each chapter in each title for each DVD (you can see why I want to automate this!)

5. Store these queries in a *.bat file

The only part I’m not sure about is step 2! I can do everything else pretty easily. I’ve read a lot about OutputStreams, but I just can’t seem to understand how it works. I really just need to get the output to a string which I can regex to get the stuff I need. Here are the screenshots of what I need to input and what I need to strip from the output:

Input to HandBrakeCLI:

Output to scan:

Answer 1

First you need a non-blocking way to read from Standard.out and Standard.err

private class ProcessResultReader extends Thread
{
    final InputStream is;
    final String type;
    final StringBuilder sb;

    ProcessResultReader(@Nonnull final InputStream is, @Nonnull String type)
    {
        this.is = is;
        this.type = type;
        this.sb = new StringBuilder();
    }

    public void run()
    {
        try
        {
            final InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(is);
            final BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(isr);
            String line = null;
            while ((line = br.readLine()) != null)
            {
                this.sb.append(line).append("\n");
            }
        }
        catch (final IOException ioe)
        {
            System.err.println(ioe.getMessage());
            throw new RuntimeException(ioe);
        }
    }

    @Override
    public String toString()
    {
        return this.sb.toString();
    }
}

Then you need to tie this class into the respective InputStream and OutputStreamobjects.

    try
    {
        final Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(String.format("cmd /c %s", query));
        final ProcessResultReader stderr = new ProcessResultReader(p.getErrorStream(), "STDERR");
        final ProcessResultReader stdout = new ProcessResultReader(p.getInputStream(), "STDOUT");
        stderr.start();
        stdout.start();
        final int exitValue = p.waitFor();
        if (exitValue == 0)
        {
            System.out.print(stdout.toString());
        }
        else
        {
            System.err.print(stderr.toString());
        }
    }
    catch (final IOException e)
    {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
    catch (final InterruptedException e)
    {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }

This is pretty much the boiler plate I use when I need to Runtime.exec() anything in Java.

A more advanced way would be to use FutureTask and Callable or at least Runnable rather than directly extending Thread which isn’t the best practice.

NOTE:

The @Nonnull annotations are in the JSR305 library. If you are using Maven, and you are using Maven aren’t you, just add this dependency to your pom.xml.

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.google.code.findbugs</groupId>
  <artifactId>jsr305</artifactId>
  <version>1.3.9</version>
</dependency>