Hi James,
What I meant was, ordinarily when a non-GUI server is running, you send info to the shell like: "Starting database", "Initiating RemoteFactory", etc. You might even send Exception info to the shell. If by some chance the user were entering a stop command at the same time output were going to the shell there might be some mixing of screen output. As for UNIX, the shell is a much more powerful device than for Windows. For instance, you can start a background process by ending a command line with &. For example, "java RemoteDataServer &" would start the
java VM and immediately return to allow any other OS command to be entered from the same shell. It's sort of like "start java RemoteDataServer" in Windows except there is not a new shell created. Also, UNIX shells parse input for regular expressions in a much more robust fashion than Windows.
You should probably assume that your assignment will ultimately be tested on a SOLARIS system which is Sun's flavor of UNIX. But if it works in a Windows shell, it should work fine in SOLARIS provided that you let it be known that the server should not run in the background.
As I said, "halt" is probably not a good command to stop the server in a UNIX environment since that is a system command which shuts down the system.
Hope this helps
Michael Morris