[Waterman]

Hi there. A friend of mine had this idea to implement an instant messaging application specific to our university's network. The advantage being, of course, that you could talk about projects and assignments with your colleagues without being seen and distracted by your regular buddy list people.

I suggested that he do a front end to the 'write' command which is available on our school's Unix system. Has this been done before? If so, you can just ignore the rest of the post and tell me... but if not, I have a few more questions.

I've been reading some Cocoa books, but I haven't read enough on the Unix port side of things. Issuing the write command from a telnet session in Terminal.app takes care of most of the heavy lifting, I think. That is, it displays the messages back and forth for both end users. I'm thinking that we need to grab that message [and send it] to our new messaging application to format and display it appropriately.

Are the Unix command line apps, such as starting a telnet session, available to applications invisibly or do we have to start up Terminal.app and do issue the commands AppleScript style?

Are there any open source Unix ports that you know of that would aid in our endeavor? In particular, I would be interested in applications that extract text from the terminal to the other application.

Thanks for your help/suggestions!

[Chuckit]

NSTask lets you run programs from within another program. I've had some problems with it (see <a href="http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=34;t=002428" target="_blank">here</a> if you want details), but in theory it should be possible to control a command line application with it.

[Mactoid]

Maybe you should look into using TCP. It is very simple to open up a connection to another computer and send a message to them via TCP. I'm sure a quick search on google would reveal an abundance of available source. You may also want to try <a href="http://freshmeat.net/" target="_blank">freshmeat.net</a> for some <a href="http://freshmeat.net/projects/crpm/?topic_id=22" target="_blank">examples</a>.