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

Objective-C (see below for Swift)

Cleaned up the code in the top answer to make it more readable, less redundant, added the benefits of the one-line method and made into an NSString category

@interface NSString (ShellExecution)
- (NSString*)runAsCommand;
@end

Implementation:

@implementation NSString (ShellExecution)

- (NSString*)runAsCommand {
    NSPipe* pipe = [NSPipe pipe];

    NSTask* task = [[NSTask alloc] init];
    [task setLaunchPath: @"/bin/sh"];
    [task setArguments:@[@"-c", [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@", self]]];
    [task setStandardOutput:pipe];

    NSFileHandle* file = [pipe fileHandleForReading];
    [task launch];

    return [[NSString alloc] initWithData:[file readDataToEndOfFile] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
}

@end

Usage:

NSString* output = [@"echo hello" runAsCommand];

And if you're having problems with output encoding:

// Had problems with `lsof` output and Japanese-named files, this fixed it
NSString* output = [@"export LANG=en_US.UTF-8;echo hello" runAsCommand];

Hope it's as useful to you as it will be to future me. (Hi, you!)

---

Swift 4

Here's a Swift example making use of Pipe, Process, and String

extension String {
    func run() -> String? {
        let pipe = Pipe()
        let process = Process()
        process.launchPath = "/bin/sh"
        process.arguments = ["-c", self]
        process.standardOutput = pipe

        let fileHandle = pipe.fileHandleForReading
        process.launch()

        return String(data: fileHandle.readDataToEndOfFile(), encoding: .utf8)
    }
}

Usage:

let output = "echo hello".run()