Need help in thread concept

[umapathy_sekar]

HI ,

My requirement is to execute a shell script from java and write the output to a file using java. If the script execution takes more than 10 mins i should kill that script execution process.

Now writing to a file and monitoring the time should happen simultaneously and once the time reaches ten min , script should be killed. I am not sure how to write this part. Please helop me on this

[travishein]

To execute the process, we want to use that ProcessBuilder API. We use the ProcessBuilder to create and then execute a Process.

It will give us an "input stream" to the process's output , so we need to read from that. This can be done by a simple thread that does a copy from the process.getInputStream() to an output stream that is your log file- it's confusing how the direction names are reversed, the direction is from the perspective of our Java program that executes this process, its output stream is our input.

And then a second thread that does a sleep for 10 minutes, and tests the process is still running to invokes the process.destroy() method to kill it. This is amusing, because there is no process.isAlive() method. What I do for this is in the main thread that launched the process (or another thread i guess), invoke the process.waitFor() and then set a flag after the process has completed

boolean isRunning = false;
ProcessBuilder builder = new ProcessBuilder(...);
Process process = builder.start();
isRunning = true;
// start the thread to copy to output stream here
// start the thread that will sleep for 10 minutes and look at iRunning value here.
process.waitFor();
isRunning = false;

[umapathy_sekar]

Hi ,

That was a nice explanation. But in the code we are setting isRunnable=false only after calling process.waitFor() method . In this case it will wait till the process is completed but if my process exceeds 10 mins i want to kill it directly . Also am new to threading let me look into it.