I'm firing up an external process from Java and grabbing its stdin, stdout and stderr via process.getInputStream() etc. My issue is: when I want to write data to my output stream (the proc's stdin) it's not getting sent until I actually call close() on the stream. I am explicitly calling flush().
I did some experimenting and noticed that if I increased the number of bytes I was sending, it would eventually go through. The magic number, on my system, is 4058 bytes.
To test I'm sending the data over to a perl script which reads like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
print "Perl starting";
while(<STDIN>) {
print "Perl here, printing this: $_"
}
Now, here's the java code:
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.OutputStream;
public class StreamsExecTest {
private static String readInputStream(InputStream is) throws IOException {
int guessSize = is.available();
byte[] bytes = new byte[guessSize];
is.read(bytes); // This call has side effect of filling the array
String output = new String(bytes);
return output;
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Starting up streams test!");
ProcessBuilder pb;
pb = new ProcessBuilder("./test.pl");
// Run the proc and grab the streams
try {
Process p = pb.start();
InputStream pStdOut = p.getInputStream();
InputStream pStdErr = p.getErrorStream();
OutputStream pStdIn = p.getOutputStream();
int counter = 0;
while (true) {
String output = readInputStream(pStdOut);
if (!output.equals("")) {
System.out.println("<OUTPUT> " + output);
}
String errors = readInputStream(pStdErr);
if (!errors.equals("")) {
System.out.println("<ERRORS> " + errors);
}
if (counter == 50) {
// Write to the stdin of the execed proc. The \n should
// in turn trigger it to treat it as a line to process
System.out.println("About to send text to proc's stdin");
String message = "hello\n";
byte[] pInBytes = message.getBytes();
pStdIn.write(pInBytes);
pStdIn.flush();
System.out.println("Sent " + pInBytes.length + " bytes.");
}
if (counter == 100) {
break;
}
Thread.sleep(100);
counter++;
}
// Cleanup
pStdOut.close();
pStdErr.close();
pStdIn.close();
p.destroy();
} catch (Exception e) {
// Catch everything
System.out.println("Exception!");
e.printStackTrace();
System.exit(1);
}
}
}
So when I run this, I get effectively nothing back. If immediately after calling flush(), I call close() on pStdIn, it works as expected. This isn't what I want though; I want to be able to continually hold the stream open and write to it whenever it so pleases me. As mentioned before, if message is 4058 bytes or larger, this will work without the close().
Is the operating system (running on 64bit Linux, with a 64bit Sun JDK for what it's worth) buffering the data before sending it? I could see Java having no real control over that, once the JVM makes the system call to write to the pipe all it can do is wait. There's another puzzle though:
The Perl script prints line before going into the while loop. Since I check for any input from Perl's stdout on every iteration of my Java loop, I would expect to see it on the first run through the loop, see the attempt at sending data from Java->Perl and then nothing. But I actually only see the initial message from Perl (after that OUTPUT message) when the write to the output stream happens. Is something blocking that I'm not aware of?
Any help greatly appreciated!