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

Here's how to do it in Swift

Changes for Swift 3.0:

• NSPipe has been renamed Pipe

• NSTask has been renamed Process

---

This is based on inkit's Objective-C answer above. He wrote it as a category on NSString — For Swift, it becomes an extension of String.

extension  String.runAsCommand()  ->  String

extension String {
    func runAsCommand() -> String {
        let pipe = Pipe()
        let task = Process()
        task.launchPath = "/bin/sh"
        task.arguments = ["-c", String(format:"%@", self)]
        task.standardOutput = pipe
        let file = pipe.fileHandleForReading
        task.launch()
        if let result = NSString(data: file.readDataToEndOfFile(), encoding: String.Encoding.utf8.rawValue) {
            return result as String
        }
        else {
            return "--- Error running command - Unable to initialize string from file data ---"
        }
    }
}

---

Usage:

let input = "echo hello"
let output = input.runAsCommand()
print(output)                        // prints "hello"

    or just:

print("echo hello".runAsCommand())   // prints "hello" 

Example:

@IBAction func toggleFinderShowAllFiles(_ sender: AnyObject) {

    var newSetting = ""
    let readDefaultsCommand = "defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles"

    let oldSetting = readDefaultsCommand.runAsCommand()

    // Note: the Command results are terminated with a newline character

    if (oldSetting == "0\n") { newSetting = "1" }
    else { newSetting = "0" }

    let writeDefaultsCommand = "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles \(newSetting) ; killall Finder"

    _ = writeDefaultsCommand.runAsCommand()

}

---

Note the Process result as read from the Pipe is an NSString object. It might be an error string and it can also be an empty string, but it should always be an NSString.

So, as long as it's not nil, the result can cast as a Swift String and returned.

If for some reason no NSString at all can be initialized from the file data, the function returns an error message. The function could have been written to return an optional String?, but that would be awkward to use and wouldn't serve a useful purpose because it's so unlikely for this to occur.