interesting read. Thanks. Susan, are you taking over the windows port? from this, does it appear that java will need separate spawn classes for each OS? --le ----- Original Message ----- From: "Susan Jolly" <easjolly@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <brailleblaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2010 1:56 PM Subject: [brailleblaster] Re: Executing external processes from Java John, if you read the documentation I referred to earlier for Apache Commons Exec you will learn that there are unfortunately numerous OS-dependent pitfalls to the use of Runtime.exec(). This is certainly not an area I know anything about but I do find Apache information to be generally quite realiable. You only need to read a bit of this tutorial to realize the need for expertise in this area. http://commons.apache.org/exec/tutorial.html SusanJ