ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

Chapter 46: Communicating with native
processes in AIR
Adobe AIR 2 and later
As of Adobe AIR 2, AIR applications can run and communicate with other native processes via the command line. For
example, an AIR application can run a process and communicate with it via the standard input and output streams.
To communicate with native processes, package an AIR application to be installed via a native installer. The file type
of native installer is specific to the operating system for which it is created:
It is a DMG file on Mac OS.
It is an EXE file on Windows.
It is an RPM or DEB package on Linux.
These applications are known as extended desktop profile applications. You can create a native installer file by
specifying the -target native option when calling the -package command using ADT.
More Help topics
flash.filesystem.File.openWithDefaultApplication()
flash.desktop.NativeProcess
Overview of native process communications
Adobe AIR 2 and later
An AIR application in the extended desktop profile can execute a file, as if it were invoked by the command line. It can
communicate with the standard streams of the native process. Standard streams include the standard input stream
(stdin), the output stream (stdout), the standard error stream (stderr).
Note: Applications in the extended desktop profile can also launch files and applications using the
File.openWithDefaultApplication() method. However, using this method does not provide the AIR application
with access to the standard streams. For more information, see “Opening files with the default system application” on
page 680
The following code sample shows how to launch a test.exe application in the application directory. The application
passes the argument "hello" as a command-line argument, and it adds an event listener to the process’s standard
output stream:
Last updated 6/6/2012
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