Process Piping

This example shows the technique called as process piping. Process piping is a technique to redirect input/out form a process to get the result in runtime. This enable us to execute any process with a given set of parameters and capture the output. In the example below weare invoking the command shell(cmd.exe) to do a ping on "Bing.com" and capture the output in the console.

	void Main()
	{
	ProcessStartInfo cmdStartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo();
	cmdStartInfo.FileName = @"C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe";
	cmdStartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
	cmdStartInfo.RedirectStandardError = true;
	cmdStartInfo.RedirectStandardInput = true;
	cmdStartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
	cmdStartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
	Process cmdProcess = new Process();
	cmdProcess.StartInfo = cmdStartInfo;
	cmdProcess.ErrorDataReceived += cmd_Error;
	cmdProcess.OutputDataReceived += cmd_DataReceived;
	cmdProcess.EnableRaisingEvents = true;
	cmdProcess.Start();
	cmdProcess.BeginOutputReadLine();
	cmdProcess.BeginErrorReadLine();
	cmdProcess.StandardInput.WriteLine("dir"); //Execute ping bing.com
	cmdProcess.StandardInput.WriteLine("exit"); //Execute exit.
	cmdProcess.WaitForExit();
	}
	static void cmd_DataReceived(object sender, DataReceivedEventArgs e)
	{
	Console.WriteLine(e.Data);
	}
	static void cmd_Error(object sender, DataReceivedEventArgs e)
	{
	Console.WriteLine("Error from other process");
	Console.WriteLine(e.Data);
	}

view raw Piping.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

We can further create a function which does the same for us, and alter the behaviour by sending different parameters.