ProcessBuilder vs Runtime.exec()

Question

Which one is better? By better I mean which one has better security, etc. (not ease of use).

Corpora

What do you mean with 'has better security'? – Adali

Answer 1

Ease of use is the only real difference between those two.

Note that ease of use can lead to security by helping to avoid mis-use.

At least on OpenJDK 6 Runtime.exec() is implemented using ProcessBuilder:

public Process exec(String[] cmdarray, String[] envp, File dir)
    throws IOException {
    return new ProcessBuilder(cmdarray)
        .environment(envp)
        .directory(dir)
        .start();
}

Changeover

Except that Runtime.exec has overloads that take command as a single String and tokenize it, but in ProcessBuilder a single String is handled as a vararg String[1] -- see #6856528 – Asel