Runtime.exec() crashes JVM

Question

I wrote a program that runs a Perl script repeatedly via Runtime.exec().
Q: Under what circumstances would this procedure silently crash the JVM? I am experiencing this behavior on Linux using Sun's JDK as well as IBM's. There is no error output. The program simply exits. What is causing this? And, how can it be avoided? If there is a way to recover from whatever problem is occurring, that would be ideal.

Answer 1

Thanks jschell! Your input is helpful.
I suspect that case #4 is in play here. When I run my program with the "-Xrs" switch, "Terminated" is outputted just before the JVM exits. Is there any way to intercept the signal to terminate from the child process before the JVM exits?
NOTE: I am not running Runtime.exec() concurrently and I am explicitly destroying each Process after process.waitFor(). Also, I tend to watch the linux "top" output to confirm that only one Perl process is running at a time. I have tried various versions of a "runCommand" method. The current version spawns no additional threads:
public static int runCommand(String[] command) throws InterruptedException, IOException
          ProcessBuilder builder = new ProcessBuilder(command);
          builder.redirectErrorStream(true);
          Process process = builder.start();
          InputStream input = null;
          InputStream error = null;
          OutputStream output = null;
          BufferedReader reader;
          String line;
          try     {
               input = process.getInputStream();
               error = process.getErrorStream();
               output = process.getOutputStream();
               reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(input));
               while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null)
                    System.out.println(line);
               return process.waitFor();
          finally
               close(output);
               close(error);
               close(input);
               process.destroy();
          }