Question

From within a ruby script, what is the best way to check if a Mac OS X app is currently running or not? I’m looking for something equivalent to this AppleScript:

if appIsRunning("iChat") then
  ...
end if

on appIsRunning(appName)
  tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning

(but I don’t want to use AppleScript, because it’s a tad slow)

Answer 1

There are probably better answers, but one simple way is to do this:

def app_is_running?(app_name)
  `ps aux` =~ /#{app_name}/ ? true : false
end

Doing this on my system (OSX Lion, Ruby 1.9.2-p290):

 app_is_running?("iChat")
 => true