External Program actions allow you to launch a program on your computer. You specify the path to the program you wish to run and any arguments to pass in to the program when it is launched (Typically leave this blank unless you need to specify some set of arguments).
The following options can be enabled when executing a program:
- Show Window: Shows the visual window of the program
- Shell Execute: Whether to use the Windows shell when running the executable
- Wait Until Complete: Waits until the program has finished executing
- Save Output: Stores any text output from the program into the following Special Identifier:
$externalprogramresult. Save Output requires Wait Until Complete, since there is nothing to capture otherwise.
Both the program’s standard output and its error output are captured, and both are read as UTF-8, so accented and non-English characters come through as the program wrote them. The action waits for everything the program buffered before filling in $externalprogramresult, so the tail of a long output is not lost when the program exits.