Pipe or Redirect within Java Command

it's common knowledge to use Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command) to execute any Unix command or Windows command in a Java application. However, when you try to include the pipe '|' or  redirect '>' in the command to alter any output pattern, most of the time the Java will not interpret your command as expected which will turn out to be an error finally. For example, when I tried to run ffmpeg command to encode any video and would like to capture those outputs into a log file, an error of "Unable to find a suitable output format for '>'" will appear.

In order to make Java "understand" out purpose, you cannot directly insert the usual command into the exec() parameter. There is a workaround which will solve the issue.

Construct an array:

String[] commands = {
"/bin/sh",
"-c",
YOUR REAL COMMAND HERE
}

and pass the commands as argument to the Runtime.getRuntime().exec(commands). In this way, the Java environment will make a sh (YOU COULD USE BASH) environment to execute your command, which will take the pipe and redirect into consideration.

Seven Java EE Performance Problems

1) Slow-running applications

2) Applications that degrade over tim

3) Slow memory leaks that gradually degrade performance

4) Huge memory leaks that crash the application server

5) Periodic CPU spikes and application freezes

6) Applications that behave significantly differently under a heavy load under normal usage patterns

7) Problems or anomalies that occur in production but cannot be reproduced in a test environment

Long IP Address

Most of the time, people will think of an IP adress as a String. Especially in Java, most of the time, developers will deal with IP address either with URL or String class. However, representing an IP adress with String has several disadvantages. First a String usually takes more memory comparing to the "same" value int or long, and it will be difficult to compare with other IP addresses with a String. And more importantly, it will not be possible for people to easily determine whether an IP address is in the range of another two IP addresses.

Since IP addresses (IPv4) are composed by four integers ranging from 0 - 255, it will be obviously easy to convert an String IP address to an numerical form which can also uniquely represent the IP address. That's how Long IP address emerges.

A simple method to convert the String IP address to a Long IP address (A.B.C.D) would be:

256*256*256*A + 256*256*B + 256*C + D

Using Long IP address will be helpful in certain scenarios, one is when you dealing with IP-Location mapping in Google App Engine. A very popular data called GeoIP created by MaxMind is heavily used in a lot of different projects. However, when parsing the IP addresses, what they have done in the Java library is first transform the IP String into an InetAddress, and then using getAddress() to get its byte[], and finally get the Long value. There will be no problem when you using this library in other platforms. But in Google App Engine, things will got stuck because of the InetAddress is on the black-list of GAE, which means you will not be able to play with this class. The workaround here would be using the converting method above, you can directly get the Long value which is what they have calculated all the way along.

There might be some other places Long IP addresses is useful, especially when dealing with range query of IP addresses.