calling C programs from java

[Steve Matthews]

I am a C programmer who has recently cross trained into java. I would like to know how I can call C programs from java. What I have in mind is to create a java GUI wrapper for some rather complex C programs that I do not want to re-write in java!
Any help would be appreciated,
bigSteve

[Dave Vick]

bigSteve
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[Gregg Bolinger]

Well, it all depends on what you mean by call C programs.
If you are just needing to execute a program you wrote in C then you could do the following:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("yourfile.exe");

If, however, you need to interface with your program written in C as far as getting reference to objects and/or variables etc, then you would have to use JNI. Here is a link to the JNI tutorial on Sun's Web site:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/native1.1/index.html
Hope that helps.