[eevyl]

Hello there,

I need to search if a specific CLI utility is running, get its PID and then send it a kill command. In REALbasic I used something like this:

command = "top -l | grep utility | tail -c +3"
myShell.execute command
utilityPID = Left(myShell.result,3)

Is there a similar way to do this in Cocoa? Can I make AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivileges execute "top -l | grep utility | tail -c +3" in one step?

Thanks in advance

[ 06-22-2001: Message edited by: eevyl ]

[Dalgo]

You don't need to use NSTask to run 3rd party apps to kill stuff. Use the kill function. I think that it is in the kernel framework. It is like:

int kill(pid_t pid, int sig);

sig is the signal that you want to send. 9 is an unconditional kill. Note that you can't kill a process unless you own it, so an admin can't kill a root process unless they su to root.

pid is just the process id number. pid_t getpid(void); will get the pid of the calling process. I'm not sure how to get the pid's of other processes, unless you created them with fork().

[eevyl]

Thanks for your reply Dalgo, but I already knew the kill stuff. I am asking for a way to ask for the PID of a known named CLI application. It is not created by a fork.

Thanks annyway.

[moki]

Originally posted by eevyl:
<STRONG>Thanks for your reply Dalgo, but I already knew the kill stuff. I am asking for a way to ask for the PID of a known named CLI application. It is not created by a fork.

Thanks annyway.</STRONG>

If you care to use Carbon, the process manager will let you do this kind of thing. If not, I'm sure there are Mach/BSD-level calls for iterating through running processes.

[lindberg]

Using ps -axc is probably better than using top, but anyways...

Look at the sysctl() function (man 3 sysctl). It is an interface to get at a lot of kernel information, including the process list.