4.2. Launching from the command line

Using the command line is perhaps the most common way to launch a batch process. Triggering the process can be done manually (by a human), but most of the time you’ll be using a system scheduler (cron on UNIX systems, for example) to trigger the launch. Why? Because batch processes are launched at specific times (at night, on the last Sunday of the month, and so on). We cover schedulers later; in this section, we focus on how to launch a batch process through the command line.

Because Spring Batch is a Java-based framework, launching a Spring Batch process means spawning a new JVM process for a class and using the Spring Batch launcher API in that class’s main method.