Process.waitFor doesn't waitFor process to terminated

Question

I have searched this website and found may people have this problem, but no one has answer the question. Does that mean there is no way around this?
This is from the API:
The Runtime.exec methods may not work well for special processes on certain native platforms.
Is this everyones problem?
This is the code I'm using:
String[] callAndArgs = {"open", fileLoc};
proc = rt.exec(callAndArgs2);
proc.waitFor();This doesn't waitFor the open file to be closed. How can I waitFor for the open file to be closed? Is there away around this? Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

Yes - you are kind of out of luck. The OS is spawning a new process to open that document, so the thread that you initiate with exec is ending, causing control to return to the Java app's .waitFor call.
Many OSes do have the ability to shell out a command and actually wait for the process to end, but you'd have to invoke a native (JNI) method to do this. For example, I know you can do this with Windows by obtaining the process ID from the ShellExecute command and then performaing a wait on the process ID.
At this point, though, you are out of the realm of Java programming.
- K