Best way to interact with Command Line application

Question

I need to write a component for an application that interacts tightly with a command line application. The command line application asks a series of questions, performs some computations, then terminates (which i need to detect). Essentially, i want to wrap up this interaction in a wrapper class.

Has any one achieved similar in the past? If so, how did you go about it? Did you notice a pattern, or maybe some good build in classes to use? Cheers!

Answer 1

You would need to redirect both the input and output streams, using Process; it is slightly trickier handling both, since you need to be careful that things aren't lost in the buffers (causing deadlock).

• MSDN : Redirecting input
• MSDN : Redirecting output
• Here's a basic alternative example.

You might also want to look at OutputDataReceived for event-based responses.

Answer 2

If all applications are developed in dotnet you can use Assembly class