Name: tb29552 Date: 05/17/98


Please don't mandate (or even suggest) buffering of subprocess
output. Provide a "BufferEverythingInputStream" instead, and
let the developer decide. If you could give me a workaround it
would help a lot. Thanks :)

Try this:

public class watchmecrash {
  public static void main (String args[]) {
     Process proc =
      Runtime.getRuntime().exec
                    ("/usr/local/bin/yes");
  }
}

Time how long it takes to run out of memory.
Try to stop it from running out of memory.

But seriously - for any kind of serious pipelined
processing or two-way interaction (eg. Expect)
buffering like this is the worst possible obstacle.

It leads to memory management problems and, a
 worst, deadlock.

I'm writing a communication layer for pipelining legacy
(ie non-java) satellite image processing codem and while
this isn't necessarily a show-stopper (I'll have to use named
pipes or something) it's going to be hard to find a good
cross-platform solution.

It looks like this implementation has found its
way into jdk1.2 as well. I realise that the
lang spec recommends this - but I don't think it
should unless there's a way to turn buffering off.
(Review ID: 30142)
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