Process API Updates (JEP 102)

[Florian Weimer]

On 03/24/2014 10:11 PM, roger riggs wrote:

>  From the scope of the JEP, a fairly simple API seems sufficient.
>   - Enumerate the direct children
>   - The rest of the functions are similar to Process
>     - to terminate a process, forcibly and normally
>     - to destroy a process and all of its children recursively
>     - to check if one is alive
>     - to waitFor for termination and retrieve the exit status

On Linux, I think you need to use obscure mechanisms to make this 
iteration reliable (cgroups perhaps).  There is no openpid() or similar 
mechanism that allows you to obtain a stable handle.

Somewhat relatedly, it would make sense to make Process auto-closeable, 
so that you can make sure that no non-Java resources are retained. 
Right now, this seems to require calling destroyForcibly().waitFor().

It would be nice if there was a way to directly pipe the output of one 
process to the input of another process.  I think that even with Java 8, 
this still needs an explicit copy loop.

-- 
Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team