Executing shell commands through beanshell in jmeter - jmeter

Question

Executing shell commands through beanshell in jmeter. I want to execute shell commands in beanshell preprocessor in jmeter
Can any one tell how to do so.

Answer 1

Beanshell is JAVA (scripting language).
Below statement should help.
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("COMMAND");

Answer 2

Based on #vins answer I cloud create my ping test to verify my email server is available.
Additionally if you want to log the output of the Runtime.getRuntime().exec("COMMAND"); use something similar to this in your jmeter BeanShell Sampler:
// ********
// Ping the email server to verify it's accessible from the execution server
//
// Preconditions:
// custom variable is available named "emailServer" which contains the IP-Adress of the machine to ping
//
// ********
log.info(Thread.currentThread().getName()+": "+SampleLabel+": Ping email server: " + vars.get("emailServer"));
// Select the ping command depending on your machine type windows or Unix machine.
//String command = "ping -n 2 " + vars.get("emailServer"); // for windows
String command = "ping -c2 " + vars.get("emailServer"); // for Unix
// Print the generated ping command
log.info(command);
// Create a process object and let this object execute the ping command
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command);
p.waitFor();
log.info("Execution complete.");
// Read the output of the ping command and log it
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()));
StringBuilder logCommandOutput = new StringBuilder();
String line;
while( (line = in.readLine()) != null) {
logCommandOutput.append(line);
}
in.close();
log.info("Output: " + logCommandOutput.toString());