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

In addition to the several excellent answers above, I use the following code to process the output of the command in the background and avoid the blocking mechanism of [file readDataToEndOfFile].

- (void)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];

    [self performSelectorInBackground:@selector(collectTaskOutput:) withObject:file];
}

- (void)collectTaskOutput:(NSFileHandle *)file
{
    NSData      *data;
    do
    {
        data = [file availableData];
        NSLog(@"%@", [[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] );

    } while ([data length] > 0); // [file availableData] Returns empty data when the pipe was closed

    // Task has stopped
    [file closeFile];
}