Difference between ProcessBuilder and Runtime.exec()

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The various overloads of Runtime.getRuntime().exec(...) take either an array of strings or a single string. The single-string overloads of exec() will tokenise the string into an array of arguments, before passing the string array onto one of the exec() overloads that takes a string array. The ProcessBuilder constructors, on the other hand, only take a varargs array of strings or a List of strings, where each string in the array or list is assumed to be an individual argument. Either way, the arguments obtained are then joined up into a string that is passed to the OS to execute.

So, for example, on Windows,

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("C:\DoStuff.exe -arg1 -arg2");

will run a DoStuff.exe program with the two given arguments. In this case, the command-line gets tokenised and put back together. However,

ProcessBuilder b = new ProcessBuilder("C:\DoStuff.exe -arg1 -arg2");

will fail, unless there happens to be a program whose name is DoStuff.exe -arg1 -arg2 in C:\. This is because there’s no tokenisation: the command to run is assumed to have already been tokenised. Instead, you should use

ProcessBuilder b = new ProcessBuilder("C:\DoStuff.exe", "-arg1", "-arg2");

or alternatively

List<String> params = java.util.Arrays.asList("C:\DoStuff.exe", "-arg1", "-arg2");
ProcessBuilder b = new ProcessBuilder(params);

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