How to execute cmd commands via Java

Every execution of exec spawns a new process with its own environment. So your second invocation is not connected to the first in any way. It will just change its own working directory and then exit (i.e. it's effectively a no-op).

If you want to compose requests, you'll need to do this within a single call to exec. Bash allows multiple commands to be specified on a single line if they're separated by semicolons; Windows CMD may allow the same, and if not there's always batch scripts.

As Piotr says, if this example is actually what you're trying to achieve, you can perform the same thing much more efficiently, effectively and platform-safely with the following:

String[] filenames = new java.io.File("C:/").list();

I found this in forums.oracle.com

Allows the reuse of a process to execute multiple commands in Windows: http://kr.forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=9250051

You need something like

   String[] command =
    {
        "cmd",
    };
    Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command);
    new Thread(new SyncPipe(p.getErrorStream(), System.err)).start();
    new Thread(new SyncPipe(p.getInputStream(), System.out)).start();
    PrintWriter stdin = new PrintWriter(p.getOutputStream());
    stdin.println("dir c:\\ /A /Q");
    // write any other commands you want here
    stdin.close();
    int returnCode = p.waitFor();
    System.out.println("Return code = " + returnCode);

SyncPipe Class:

class SyncPipe implements Runnable
{
public SyncPipe(InputStream istrm, OutputStream ostrm) {
      istrm_ = istrm;
      ostrm_ = ostrm;
  }
  public void run() {
      try
      {
          final byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
          for (int length = 0; (length = istrm_.read(buffer)) != -1; )
          {
              ostrm_.write(buffer, 0, length);
          }
      }
      catch (Exception e)
      {
          e.printStackTrace();
      }
  }
  private final OutputStream ostrm_;
  private final InputStream istrm_;
}

The code you posted starts three different processes each with it's own command. To open a command prompt and then run a command try the following (never tried it myself):

try {
    // Execute command
    String command = "cmd /c start cmd.exe";
    Process child = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command);

    // Get output stream to write from it
    OutputStream out = child.getOutputStream();

    out.write("cd C:/ /r/n".getBytes());
    out.flush();
    out.write("dir /r/n".getBytes());
    out.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
}

If you want to run several commands in the cmd shell then you can construct a single command like this:

  rt.exec("cmd /c start cmd.exe /K \"cd c:/ && dir\"");

This page explains more.