User Guide

124 Chapter 2: ColdFusion Tags
cfexecute
Description
Executes a ColdFusion developer-specified process on a server computer.
Category
Extensibility tags, Flow-control tags
Syntax
<cfexecute
name = "application name"
arguments = "command line arguments"
outputFile = "output filename"
variable = "variable name"
timeout = "timeout interval">
...
</cfexecute>
See also
cfcollection, cfindex, cfobject, cfreport, cfsearch, cfwddx
History
ColdFusion MX 6.1:
• Added the variable attribute.
• Changed file path behavior for the outputFile attribute: if you do not specify an absolute file
path in the
outputFile attribute, the path is relative to the ColdFusion temporary directory.
Attributes
Attribute Req/Opt Default Description
name Required Absolute path of the application to execute.
On Windows, you must specify an extension; for example,
C:\myapp.exe.
arguments Optional Command-line variables passed to application. If specified as
string, it is processed as follows:
• Windows: passed to process control subsystem for parsing.
• UNIX: tokenized into an array of arguments. The default
token separator is a space; you can delimit arguments that
have embedded spaces with double-quotation marks.
If passed as array, it is processed as follows:
• Windows: Elements are concatenated into a string of tokens,
separated by spaces. Passed to process control subsystem
for parsing.
• UNIX: Elements are copied into an array of exec() arguments.