Are you talking about the java.lang.Process class? You create these using the Runtime.exec() methods or the ProcessBuilder class (in JDK 1.5). Process itself is an abstract class with no code in it at all -- it could have been an interface, and probably should have been. Because it's abstract, you can't create an instance of it. But if you could, it wouldn't do anything at all; only its platform-specific subclasses will actually start a process.