A StreamGobbler is an InputStream that uses an internal worker
thread to constantly consume input from another InputStream. It uses a buffer
to store the consumed data. The buffer size is automatically adjusted, if needed.
This class is sometimes very convenient - if you wrap a session's STDOUT and STDERR
InputStreams with instances of this class, then you don't have to bother about
the shared window of STDOUT and STDERR in the low level SSH-2 protocol,
since all arriving data will be immediatelly consumed by the worker threads.
Also, as a side effect, the streams will be buffered (e.g., single byte
read() operations are faster).
Other SSH for Java libraries include this functionality by default in
their STDOUT and STDERR InputStream implementations, however, please be aware
that this approach has also a downside:
If you do not call the StreamGobbler's read() method often enough
and the peer is constantly sending huge amounts of data, then you will sooner or later
encounter a low memory situation due to the aggregated data (well, it also depends on the Java heap size).
Joe Average will like this class anyway - a paranoid programmer would never use such an approach.
The term "StreamGobbler" was taken from an article called "When Runtime.exec() won't",
see http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-2000/jw-1229-traps.html.
author:
Christian Plattner, plattner@inf.ethz.ch
version:
$Id: StreamGobbler.java,v 1.4 2006/02/14 19:43:16 cplattne Exp $ | 