On Feb 20, 2013, at 4:18 PM, dangerwillrobinsondan...@gmail.com wrote: > Is there a way to feed an NSTask argument data when the command line tool in > the task expects a file path argument? > I would like to not actually create a file to use as the argument, but rather > send data that would be in said file. > Can this be done via NSFileHandle or NSPipe from NSData?
It is possible to send data to a task. For example, you can send data to the task's standard input file descriptor by using -[NSTask setStandardInput:]. However, this only works if the command line tool is expecting to read from standard input. There are conventions to ask a command line tool to read standard input instead of a file (for example, setting the file name argument to "-"), but you can't force the tool to do so. Check the tool's documentation. One alternative is to use a Unix named pipe. A named pipe is a pipe - one end writes, the other end reads - but it looks like a file in the filesystem and can be opened and read or written as if it were a file, as long as the reader or writer makes a single pass straight through the file. That means in some cases you can create a named pipe and pass that name to the command line tool. You would probably have to drop down to the C mkfifo() function to create the named pipe; I don't know if any Cocoa classes can create them. There are some other complications like preventing security holes (don't use /tmp) and cleaning up orphaned pipes if your app crashes or is killed while the pipe is open. The internet has examples of those problems and how to solve them. -- Greg Parker gpar...@apple.com Runtime Wrangler _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
