How do I call an external program

Question

From within my Java program I want to execute an
external program and dump the output into a string
or array of strings. In perl this is trivial $a=`dir`.
How do I do it in Java?
Thanx,
Art.

Answer 1

with Runtime
            try {
                    Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd.exe /c dir");
                    BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()));
                    String str = "";
                    while((str = in.readLine()) != null)
                        //do what you want to with input
                    in.close();
                catch(Exception e)
                    e.printStackTrace();
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