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Asked: 2026-06-10T20:59:36+00:00

Given the PID of a process, how can I check if it’s a windowed

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Given the PID of a process, how can I check if it’s a windowed process? I am looking for a solution on OSX.

Objective-C/ C solutions are wanted.
I am on OSX Mountain Lion.

I am defining a windowed process as a process that can be seen when the “Windowed Processes” tab is selected in activity monitor. http://cl.ly/FeXR

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  1. Editorial Team
    [NSWorkspace runningApplications]

    This returns all the user applications in a NSArray as instances of NSRunningApplication which has a property processIdentifier.

    Or you can use runningApplicationWithProcessIdentifier: directly to get the application with a specified PID.

    Here is the sample code: http://developer.apple.com/library/Mac/#samplecode/AppList/Introduction/Intro.html

    Through the activationPolicy property of the NSRunningApplication you could get the Windowed state. I modified the AppList code to make it show only the windowed applications as shown below. This matches what the activity monitor shows.

    enter image description here

    In particular, you are looking for the NSApplicationActivationPolicyRegular.

    Note the restrictions however. This only works for user owned processes.

    All other methods are deprecated and may not work in future. Methods like GetBSDProcessList and Carbon’s GetProcessInformation are not recommended anymore.

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