Quotes in parameters to a system call

Question

Hello,
From my program, which is a servlet, I'm making a system call using -
(Runtime.getRuntime()).exec(cmd).waitFor();
where cmd is a previously defined String giving the call to execute. The problem here is seen when the parameters to cmd (which happens to be a perl script in this case) include one or more where the values are strings which include spaces, and hence are in double quotes. For example, if I want to execute -
/usr/local/bin/myScript.pl -t "Some text"
When executed from a prompt this works fine and -t has the value -
Some text
However when called from my Java program as above, the script instead thinks that -t has the value -
"Some
I'm not sure how this is coming about, but it seems to be a feature of the way Java executes the command. Has anybody seen this before? How do I stop it happening? I have tried every combination of quotes of which I can think, but nothing seems to do what I want, and the command string when printed to screen, for example, looks exactly as it should.
Thanks,
Joe Partridge

Answer 1

Or sat all separate parts in String[] like this:
String[] cmds={"/usr/local/bin/myScript.pl","-t","Some text"}
and call:
(Runtime.getRuntime()).exec(cmds).waitFor();
That also works and you don't have to remember to put quotes all the time
Gil