ProcessBuilder adds extra quotes to command line

Question

I need to build the following command using ProcessBuilder:

"C:\Program Files\USBDeview\USBDeview.exe" /enable "My USB Device"

I tried with the following code:

ArrayList<String> test = new ArrayList<String>();
test.add("\"C:\\Program Files\\USBDeview\\USBDeview.exe\"");
test.add("/enable \"My USB Device\"");  

ProcessBuilder processBuilder = new ProcessBuilder(test);                       
processBuilder.start().waitFor();   

However, this passes the following to the system (verified using Sysinternals Process Monitor)

"C:\Program Files\USBDeview\USBDeview.exe" "/enable "My USB Device""

Note the quote before /enable and the two quotes after Device . I need to get rid of those extra quotes because they make the invocation fail. Does anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

Joachim is correct, but his answer is insufficient when your process expects unified arguments as below:

myProcess.exe /myParameter="my value"

As seen by stefan, ProcessBuilder will see spaces in your argument and wrap it in quotes, like this:

myProcess.exe "/myParameter="my value""

Breaking up the parameter values as Joachim recommends will result in a space between /myparameter= and "my value" , which will not work for this type of parameter:

myProcess.exe /myParameter= "my value"

According to Sun, in their infinite wisdom , it is not a bug and double quotes can be escaped to achieve the desired behavior.

So to finally answer stefan's question, this is an alternative that SHOULD work, if the process you are calling does things correctly:

ArrayList<String> test = new ArrayList<String>();
test.add("\"C:\\Program Files\\USBDeview\\USBDeview.exe\"");
test.add("/enable \\\"My USB Device\\\"");

This should give you the command "C:\\Program Files\\USBDeview\\USBDeview.exe" "/enable \\"My USB Device\\"" , which may do the trick; YMMV.

Answer 2

As far as I understand, since ProcessBuilder has no idea how parameters are to be passed to the command, you'll need to pass the parameters separately to ProcessBuilder;

ArrayList<String> test = new ArrayList<String>();
test.add("\"C:\\Program Files\\USBDeview\\USBDeview.exe\"");
test.add("/enable");
test.add("\"My USB Device\"");

Answer 3

First, you need to split up the arguments yourself - ProcessBuilder doesn't do that for you - and second you don't need to put escaped quotes around the argument values.

ArrayList<String> test = new ArrayList<String>();
test.add("C:\\Program Files\\USBDeview\\USBDeview.exe");
test.add("/enable");
test.add("My USB Device");

The quotes are necessary on the command line in order to tell the cmd parser how to break up the words into arguments, but ProcessBuilder doesn't need them because it's already been given the arguments pre-split.

Answer 4

I wasn't able to get it to work in any of the above ways. I ended up writing the command to a separate script (with "\\ " for each space) and writing that into a script file, then calling the script file.