Read from the InputStream. You can append the output to a StringBuilder:

BufferedReader reader = 
                new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getInputStream()));
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
String line = null;
while ( (line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
   builder.append(line);
   builder.append(System.getProperty("line.separator"));
}
String result = builder.toString();

You have provided very few details in your question, so I can only provide a general answer.

All processes have three standard streams: standard input, standard output and standard error. Standard input is used for reading in data, standard output for writing out data, and standard error for writing out error messages. When you start an external program using Runtime.getRuntime().exec() or ProcessBuilder, Java will create a Process object for the external program, and this Process object will have methods to access these streams.

These streams are accessed as follows:

• process.getOutputStream(): return the standard input of the external program. This is an OutputStream as it is something your Java code will write to.
• process.getInputStream(): return the standard output of the external program. This is an InputStream as it is something your Java code will read from.
• process.getErrorStream(): return the standard error of the external program. This is an InputStream as, like standard output, it is something your Java code will read from.

Note that the names of getInputStream() and getOutputStream() can be confusing.

All streams between your Java code and the external program are buffered. This means each stream has a small amount of memory (a buffer) where the writer can write data that is yet to be read by the reader. The writer does not have to wait for the reader to read its data immediately; it can leave its output in the buffer and continue.

There are two ways in which writing to buffers and reading from them can hang:

• attempting to write data to a buffer when there is not enough space left for the data,
• attempting to read from an empty buffer.

In the first situation, the writer will wait until space is made in the buffer by reading data out of it. In the second, the reader will wait until data is written into the buffer.

You mention that closing the stream returned by getOutputStream() caused your program to complete successfully. This closes the standard input of the external program, telling it that there will be nothing more for it to read. If your program then completes successfully, this suggests that your program was waiting for more input to come when it was hanging.

It is perhaps arguable that if you do run an external program, you should close its standard input if you don't need to use it, as you have done. This tells the external program that there will be no more input, and so removes the possibility of it being stuck waiting for input. However, it doesn't answer the question of why your external program is waiting for input.

Most of the time, when you run external programs using Runtime.getRuntime().exec() or ProcessBuilder, you don't often use the standard input. Typically, you'd pass whatever inputs you'd need to the external program on the command line and then read its output (if it generates any at all).

Does your external program do what you need it to and then get stuck, apparently waiting for input? Do you ever need to send it data to its standard input? If you start a process on Windows using cmd.exe /k ..., the command interpreter will continue even after the program it started has exited. In this case, you should use /c instead of /k.

Finally, I'd like to emphasise that there are two output streams, standard output and standard error. There can be problems if you read from the wrong stream at the wrong time. If you attempt to read from the external program's standard output while its buffer is empty, your Java code will wait for the external program to generate output. However, if your external program is writing a lot of data to its standard error, it could fill the buffer and then find itself waiting for your Java code to make space in the buffer by reading from it. The end result of this is your Java code and the external program are both waiting for each other to do something, i.e. deadlock.

This problem can be eliminated simply by using a ProcessBuilder and ensuring that you call its redirectErrorStream() method with a true value. Calling this method redirects the standard error of the external program into its standard output, so you only have one stream to read from.

You are probably experiencing a race condition: after writing the command to the shell, your Java program continues to run, and almost immediately calls reader.ready(). The command you wanted to execute has probably not yet output anything, so the reader has no data available. An alternative explanation would be that the command does not write anything to stdout, but only to stderr (or the shell, maybe it has failed to start the command?). You are however not reading from stderr in practice.

To properly handle output and error streams, you cannot check reader.ready() but need to call readLine() (which waits until data is available) in a loop. With your code, even if the program would come to that point, you would read only exactly one line from the output. If the program would output more than one line, this data would get interpreted as the output of the next command. The typical solution is to read in a loop until readLine() returns null, but this does not work here because this would mean your program would wait in this loop until the shell terminates (which would never happen, so it would just hang infinitely). Fixing this would be pretty much impossible, if you do not know exactly how many lines each command will write to stdout and stderr.

However, your complicated approach of using a shell and sending commands to it is probably completely unnecessary. Starting a command from within your Java program and from within the shell is equally fast, and much easier to write. Similarly, there is no performance difference between Runtime.exec() and ProcessBuilder (the former just calls the latter), you only need ProcessBuilder if you need its advanced features.

If you are experiencing performance problems when calling external programs, you should find out where they are exactly and try to solve them, but not with this approach. For example, normally one starts a thread for reading from both the output and the error stream (if you do not start separate threads and the command produces large output, everything might hang). This could be slow, so you could use a thread pool to avoid repeated spawning of processes.

Exception in thread "main" java.io.IOException: The pipe has been ended

This means the process you have started has died. I suggest you read the output to see why. e.g. did it give you an error.

The issue here is that /bin/cat does not actually write to files, it merely writes to standard out. The output redirection >/tmp/receive.dat is actually performed by the shell, but you are bypassing the shell by invoking cat in this manner.

If what you are trying to achieve is merely an OutputStream that writes to a file, then doing that via standard java I/O (e.g., FileOutputStream and friends) is what you want. It is also cross-platform (i.e., Windows-friendly), unlike anything that depends on the shell.

Regarding the comment about not being able to merely write to standard out from java because of subprocesses - any subprocess you invoke can inherit standard out from their parent process (the java process - look at ProcessBuilder.Redirect.INHERIT). So even if you are invoking subprocesses from java, redirecting all the output to a file should still work in the same way as your initial example (where the java program replaces the echo command).

Use ProcessBuilder.inheritIO, it sets the source and destination for subprocess standard I/O to be the same as those of the current Java process.

CopyProcess p = new ProcessBuilder().inheritIO().command("command1").start();

If Java 7 is not an option

Copypublic static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd /c dir");
    inheritIO(p.getInputStream(), System.out);
    inheritIO(p.getErrorStream(), System.err);

}

private static void inheritIO(final InputStream src, final PrintStream dest) {
    new Thread(new Runnable() {
        public void run() {
            Scanner sc = new Scanner(src);
            while (sc.hasNextLine()) {
                dest.println(sc.nextLine());
            }
        }
    }).start();
}

Threads will die automatically when subprocess finishes, because src will EOF.