This is probably a stupid question, but how can I execute a shell command from my Cocoa app?
I have the command as a string "command", but can easily manipulate data as needed.
There is no need to get a returned output value.
NSTask is pretty easy to do this with. For a synchronous call, you can use something like this fragment:
NSString *path = @"/path/to/executable";
NSArray *args = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:..., nil];
[[NSTask launchedTaskWithLaunchPath:path arguments:args] waitUntilExit];
The -waitUntilExit
call makes sure it finishes before proceeding. If the task can be asynchronous, you can remove that call and just let the NSTask do it's thing.
If you just want to run something and don't care about the output or return code (for example, you want to touch a file), you can just do
system("touch myfile.txt");
Easy as that.
NSTask
Using the NSTask class, your program can run another program as a subprocess and can monitor that program’s execution.
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