Tips/tricks/gotchas for using System.Diagnostics.Process and Process.Start

Question

I've used Process.Start to shell out and call 7zip to archive stuff I've also used it to call ffmpeg to compress video files.

That was a while ago..but I rememeber there was some issue about the pcocess stalling if you don't read off the standardoutput/error. I don't remember everything about it. Does anyone have experience using System.Diagnostics.Process for the purposes of initiating a long running process and waiting for it to finish?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you do not redirect the output it should not be a concern.

Answer 2

If you redirect as I did, using the following to avoid deadlocks. See doumentation for ProcessStartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.processstartinfo.redirectstandardoutput.aspx. My longest session was forty minutes scanning my hard drive with ExifTool.

        _process.Start()

        Dim sXmlOutput As String = _process.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd
        Dim sErrOutput As String = _process.StandardError.ReadToEnd

        _process.WaitForExit()