So you’re developing a ColdFusion application and you need to access the output of a Windows program, like ‘netstat.exe‘ to take the example from the Adobe documentation?
The documentation on how to do that is relatively complete, but fails to emphasise an important point. Try this, and you’ll see… nothing, no output:
<cfexecute name="C:/Windows..../netstat.exe" variable="output" />
<cfdump var="#output#" />
The important point is that you really need to specify a non-zero ‘timeout‘ argument if want to capture the output of the Windows tool in a variable. Simple, but yes: this one had me stumped for 90 seconds!
<cfexecute name="C:/Windows..../netstat.exe" variable="output" timeout="1" >
<cfdump var="#output#" />
If you forget that ‘timeout‘ argument the command you issue will execute, but you won’t know its output, since ColdFusion is already further along in its execution. You may have to experiment a bit with the value for the timeout, depending on the specifics of the machine you’re running ColdFusion on and the execution time of the command called (obviously). Not specifying the timeout will launch the command, but it won’t wait for the command to end – which can be useful as well – but not always.
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