How to launch a command line app from CLR

Just saw this one fly by on an internal list and thought google might help someone find it someday:

Question: I have “myapp.exe a b” to be executed. How can I launch such command with CLR API?

Answer (a local smart guy): System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("myapp.exe", "\"a\" \"b\"");

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 20, 2004
  I don't believe you need the inner quotes. It should work fine like System.Diagnositics.Process.Start("myapp.exe", "a b"); If you pass it with quotes it would be equivalent to "myapp.exe "a" "b"".
  
  Wes
• Anonymous
  September 20, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  September 20, 2004
  I agree on both previous comments ;-) I don't see the need for the extra quotes and there's something weird about Process not living in e.g. System.Runtime or System.Threading.
  
  Related to the Process.Start call: it gets fishy if you have a full commandline you want to run but not the exe name and the arguments separately. I came across this when trying to launch the default email client (see http://jelle.druyts.net/PermaLink.aspx?guid=b8e15df1-5948-4f87-a976-b858a65c9baa): I built in some basic argument extractor but it's not really clean since it just checks for a space - which would be incorrect if the exe name is quoted and contains spaces. Point being: there should be a Process.Start(string fullCommandLine) overload :-)
• Anonymous
  September 20, 2004
  Whoops, scratch §2 in the previous comment: that wouldn't be possible of course since that method signature is already used for launching a process without any arguments. So I would opt for a "static ProcessStartInfo Parse(string fullCommandLine)" method on ProcessStartInfo. That would simply allow you to do
  
  Process.Start(ProcessStartInfo.Parse(fullCommandLine));
• Anonymous
  September 20, 2004
  You can also use (and I prefer) the startInfo class and use the arguments property of it.
  
  process.startInfo.arguments = "arguments here"
  process.start()
  
  
  
  
• Anonymous
  September 20, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  September 27, 2004
  I really hate System.Diagnostics not being in the .NET Compact Framework - it's always a little painful to see CF code have to recreate the Process.Start code with P/Invoke's. It's a cut I can understand, but I don't have to like it :)
• Anonymous
  September 27, 2004
  Good news for you James... I just learned that this will be in V2.0 of the Compact Framework. It did not make it until Beta1, but it will be in Beta2 and RTM...
• Anonymous
  October 15, 2004
  Brad,
  
  It looks like [ProcessStartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput] flag doesn't work while used within Windows Service.
  
  While writing Subversion backup service i've experienced that following code fills [backupData] string while called whithin Console app but produces no output/Exceptions while called within Windows Service (used context of admin user):
  
  ProcessStartInfo psi = new ProcessStartInfo();
  psi.FileName = svnAdminPath;
  psi.Arguments = arguments;
  psi.UseShellExecute = false;
  psi.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
  string backupData = string.Empty;
  try
  {
  Process process = Process.Start(psi);
  backupData = process.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd();
  process.WaitForExit();
  }
  catch (Exception ex)
  {
  EventLog.WriteEntry("SvnBackupSource", ex.Message, EventLogEntryType.Error);
  }
  
  Could you please provide some comments on the issue?
• Anonymous
  May 03, 2008
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