[kepler-dev] [Bug 3207] - consolidate command line execution actors

[bugzilla-daemon at ecoinformatics.org]

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3207





------- Comment #2 from crawl at sdsc.edu  2008-04-08 10:51 -------
Hi Christopher,

Thanks for helping out. The Ptolemy Exec actor is called "External
Execution" in its KAR file, so there are only two actors that need
to be consolidated.

Both Exec and CommandLineExec have the following:

command         portparameter   command with arguments to execute
directory       fileparameter   working dir
environment     parameter       env vars for child process
input(Stream)   input port      strings to stdin
output(Stream)  output port     strings from stdout
error/exitCode  output port     strings from stderr

Exec additionally has:

throwExceptionOnNonZeroReturn parameter if true, throw exception if failure

CommandLineExec additionally has:

arguments       input port      command arguments
infileHandle    input port      use file for stdin (e.g., ./run < file)
outputFile      fileportparameter use file for stdout (e.g., ./run > file)
outfileHandle   output port     copy of outputFile
waitForProcess  parameter       if true, wait for child proc
outputLineByLine parameter      not used
hasTrigger      parameter       if true, create input trigger port

The first three (arguments, infileHandle, and outputFile) are not
strictly necessary since the same information can be provided in
the command string. (This works in CommandLineExec, but not in Exec;
this is probably due to the different ways they tokenize their
arguments). If outputFile is removed, then so should outfileHandle.

A more flexible approach to trigger the actor is subclass it from
LimitedFiringSource, which would give it a trigger port and
firingCountLimit parameter.

The remaining parameters, throwExceptionOnNonZeroReturn and waitForProcess,
seem useful to me.

Thoughts?