Execute a terminal command from a Cocoa app

Question

How can I execute a terminal command (like grep) from my Objective-C Cocoa application?

Answer 1

kent's article gave me a new idea. this runCommand method doesn't need a script file, just runs a command by a line:

- (NSString *)runCommand:(NSString *)commandToRun
{
    NSTask *task = [[NSTask alloc] init];
    [task setLaunchPath:@"/bin/sh"];

    NSArray *arguments = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:
                          @"-c" ,
                          [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@", commandToRun],
                          nil];
    NSLog(@"run command:%@", commandToRun);
    [task setArguments:arguments];

    NSPipe *pipe = [NSPipe pipe];
    [task setStandardOutput:pipe];

    NSFileHandle *file = [pipe fileHandleForReading];

    [task launch];

    NSData *data = [file readDataToEndOfFile];

    NSString *output = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
    return output;
}

You can use this method like this:

NSString *output = runCommand(@"ps -A | grep mysql");