Executing shell commands with NSTask - Objective-C Cocoa

Rstew picture Rstew · Jul 31, 2013 · Viewed 19.2k times · Source

I have been searching for days and hours for this, I have seen a lot of examples of this, but cannot figure out how NSTask works, let's say I wanted to execute the command killall Dock or defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES something like that, how would I go about doing this.

I know how to execute an external shell script (sh) but need to be more sophisticated and use NSTask instead.

Thanks for any help!!

Answer

Wain picture Wain · Jul 31, 2013

You could do something like:

NSTask *task = [[NSTask alloc] init];
[task setLaunchPath:@"/bin/bash"];
[task setArguments:@[ @"-c", @"/usr/bin/killall Dock" ]];
[task launch];

Exactly what launch path and arguments you provide are dictated by the command you want to run and its parameters.