When I execute a command using ProcessBuilder, how does it know where to look for that command? Using this hack/trick I’ve modified my PATH variable (verified by inspecting processBuilder.environment()) to be bad (empty, working dir, etc) but ProcessBuilder can still execute sort, echo, bash, etc. just fine. How is it doing this?!
Note: My particular development environment is OSX but this code will also run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The documentation says
Which in essence mean that where it looks for programs to execute depends on the particular system and JVM you’re running on.
I can’t find a complete matrix of JVM / System behaviors, but supposedly it behaves similar to the popular shells of the system (
bashfor *nix andcmdfor windows) i.e. it searches the directories in thePATHenvironment variable from left to right and executes the first executable file it finds.