[Biojava-l] ProcessTools news

[Thomas Down]

Hi...

There seems to be quite a bit of interest in this subject, so
I thought I'd post an update.

Francois Pepin has kindly merged in some functionality from
ExecRunner.  You can now specify a single command line
String, instead of an arguments array, and on Windows
platforms that will be processed using the appropriate
shell.

I've also added a timeout facility to kill long-running jobs.
This is slightly different from ExecRunner: timeouts are
specified when calling the ProcessTools.exec method, and
you get a ProcessTimeoutException if the time limit is
exceeded.  This is implemented using a `time bomb' pattern,
which should be very efficient on any platform that has
a vaguely sane threading library, so I'd encourage anyone
writing pipeline-type code to consider setting sensible timeouts
on their processes.

There are a few (Unix-centric) examples in demos/process/

    Thomas.