Programming ColdFusion

Executing Programs

As of ColdFusion 4.5, you can execute command-line programs residing on the same machine as the ColdFusion Application Server, using the CFEXECUTE tag. This tag allows you to call external programs such as batch utilities from within your ColdFusion application. The following syntax calls an external program using CFEXECUTE:

<CFEXECUTE NAME="path_to_program_to_execute" 
           ARGUMENTS="argument_string" 
           OUTPUTFILE="path_to_output_file"
           TIMEOUT="timeout_in_seconds">
</CFEXECUTE>

The NAME attribute is required and specifies the full path, including filename to the file you want to execute. Depending on the program you are attempting to execute, you may be able to specify just the program name without the full path. ARGUMENTS allows you to specify any optional arguments you want to pass to the external program. ARGUMENTS can be either strings or arrays and adhere to the following conventions:

Strings

On Windows platforms, the entire string is passed to the Windows process control subsystem for processing.

On Unix and Linux systems, the string is tokenized into an array of strings, delimited by spaces. If spaces occur in the array elements, they are escaped by double quotes.

Arrays

On Windows platforms, the elements of the array are concatenated into a space-delimited string of tokens, which is then passed to the Windows process control subsystem for processing.

On Unix and Linux systems, the elements of the array are copied into an array of exec( ) arguments.

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