[DaGuy]

I'm building a Cocoa app that uses NSTask to launch a shell script; the shell script, in turn, launches a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) process. I need to get the PID for the JVM process into the Cocoa app.

I can certainly get the PID for the shell script via:

taskPID = [task processIdentifier];

But don't know how to get the PID for the JVM. Any ideas on how I can read the JVM PID into my Cocoa app?

Thanks,

[DaGuy]

Another approach would be to have my Cocoa app monitor the lifecycle of a Unix process that it did not directly start.

For example,

1. Launch My.app and it would watch for Terminal.app launch events.

2. When I launch the Terminal.app (from the dock) My.app would display a message indicating that Terminal.app was launched along with with its Unix PID.

3. When I quit the Terminal.app, then My.app displays a message indicating that Terminal.app has exited.

Any ideas, on how to approach this scenario?
All I found is good facilities for processes that are launched by a Cocoa application but nothing about monitoring existing processes.

I figure that periodically polling the system through an NSTask that invokes "ps -ax" and then have My.app parse the output for PIDs is inefficient and ugly. There's gotta be a better way, right?

[calumr]

Originally posted by DaGuy:

All I found is good facilities for processes that are launched by a Cocoa application but nothing about monitoring existing processes.

Look in the NSWorkspace docs:

NSWorkspaceWillLaunchApplicationNotification

NSWorkspaceDidTerminateApplicationNotification

It only works for apps that appear in the Dock, but I think that's what you wanted.

[DaGuy]

Originally posted by calumr:
Look in the NSWorkspace docs:

NSWorkspaceWillLaunchApplicationNotification

NSWorkspaceDidTerminateApplicationNotification

It only works for apps that appear in the Dock, but I think that's what you wanted.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of NSWorkspace. As you mentioned (and unfortunately for me) it only picks up dock launched applications.

It would certainly work well for the scenario that I described above but going back to my first post, It's a Java process that I'm really interested in. Perhaps picking the Terminal.app to illustrate my point wasn't very wise. In any event, I added NSWorkspace to my repertoire -and that's a good thing.

Any ideas on how to get the same sort of info (app name, PID) but not just for doc launched processes but for any running process?

Thanks,

[Chuckit]

It sounds like what you're looking for is sysctl() (declared in sys/sysctl.h). Apple has an example that ought to put you on the right track.

[DaGuy]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
It sounds like what you're looking for is sysctl() (declared in sys/sysctl.h). Apple has an example that ought to put you on the right track.

Yes, this is exactly what I've been looking for!
Thanks a whole bunch. I forgot to check for the regular C stuff -a.k.a. Cocoa obsession.