Opening a UNIX shell in Java

Hi,
I need to simulate the machine's native shell (e.g. cmd\sh in case of windows\unix respectively). For that I open up a UNIX shell in my Java program using the usual manner:
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("sh");Then I use the input and output streams of the Process in order to "communicate" with the process.
My code works fine with windows shell ('cmd') but with unix ('sh') I failed to retrieve the machine's prompt. I believe that the issue is unix-related and that the process I launched has no appropriate environment parameter.
Any idea?
Thanks in advance

Thanks for your fast reply.
Although the article was interesting and did review the java.lang.Runtime quite good, it didn't help me as I have a specific problem with Unix OS and the article deliberately (or not) ignored that.
I noticed that when I print the environments variables in my java application I get a partial list which doesn't contain the prompt (for instance the SP1 variable) whilst execute the 'set' command (not from java) i get a longer list and the prompt variable appears there.
Any idea how should I execute the shell through java in order to receive the prompt?

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