Thursday, April 19, 2012

Passing wilcard * in Runtime.exec() command

One of the projects I was consulting on approached me with a peculiar problem.
The application was executing unix commands from a Java program using RunTime.exec() APIs. But strangely for some reason, the "rm" command was not working. The user account running the Java process had the necessary rights for deletion, so the problem was somewhere else.

A quick googling around answered the problem :)
http://www.coderanch.com/t/423573/java/java/Passing-wilcard-Runtime-exec-command

Its important to remember that when we pass wildcards to the RunTime.exec() API, it will treat it as a string only. It is the Unix shell that understands the "*" syntax.
Hence something like this would work: Runtime.exec(new String[] { "sh", "-c", "rm /tmp/ABC*" });

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