ProcessBuilder on OSX

Question

I am able to successfully execute this on windows:

builder = new ProcessBuilder("cmd.exe", "/c", "nmap " + ipRange, "&cd");

But this on OSX fails:

builder = new ProcessBuilder("/usr/local/bin/nmap", ipRange);

With the error:

"Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2012年03月22日 09:51 PDT

Invalid host expression: 127.0.0.1 -p T:80 -- colons only allowed in IPv6 addresses, and then you need the -6 switch

QUITTING!"

What is the correct way to create that ProcessBuilder for OSX? Thanks

Answer 1

I'm guessing you are trying to pass two separate parameters as one String in ipRange. The ProcessBuilder probably wraps the ipRange String with quotes and messes up the command syntax. You need to add all parameters separately

Not like this:

new ProcessBuilder("/usr/local/bin/nmap", "-foo foo -bar bar");

but like this:

new ProcessBuilder("/usr/local/bin/nmap", "-foo", "foo", "-bar", "bar");

• user1286505: Thank you very much, that solved it. Any ideas why it's not an issue on windows?
• Sean Patrick Floyd: Basically, if your previous version worked on windows, your lucky. But ProcessBuilder is only intended to work if you specify each parameter separately. The docs are unfortunately not specific about this.