Groovy executing shell commands

Question

Groovy adds the execute method to String to make executing shells fairly easy;

println "ls".execute().text

but if an error happens, then there is no resulting output. Is there an easy way to get both the standard error and standard out? (other than creating a bunch of code to; create two threads to read both inputstreams, then using a parent stream to wait for them to complete then convert the strings back to text?)

It would be nice to have something like;

 def x = shellDo("ls /tmp/NoFile")
 println "out: ${x.out} err:${x.err}"

Thx -bob

Answer 1

"ls".execute() returns a Process object which is why "ls".execute().text works. You should be able to just read the error stream to determine if there were any errors.

There is a extra method on Process that allow you to pass a StringBuffer to retrieve the text: consumeProcessErrorStream(StringBuffer error).

Example:

def proc = "ls".execute()
def b = new StringBuffer()
proc.consumeProcessErrorStream(b)

println proc.text
println b.toString()

Answer 2

Ok, solved it myself;

def sout = new StringBuffer(), serr = new StringBuffer()
def proc = 'ls /badDir'.execute()
proc.consumeProcessOutput(sout, serr)
proc.waitForOrKill(1000)
println "out> $sout err> $serr"

displays:

out> err> ls: cannot access /badDir: No such file or directory