Question

Is there a way that lets me run a shell script, and display the output in an NSTextView? I do not want any input from the user to the shell script at all, since is is just called to compile a buch of files. The shell script part works fine so far, but I just can’t figure out how to run it and show the output in an NSTextView. I know a shell script can be run using system() and NSTask, but how do I get it’s output into an NSTextView?

Answer 1

If you want wildcard expansion then pass your unix command to /bin/sh

- (NSString *)unixSinglePathCommandWithReturn:(NSString *) command {
    // performs a unix command by sending it to /bin/sh and returns stdout.
    // trims trailing carriage return
    // not as efficient as running command directly, but provides wildcard expansion

    NSPipe *newPipe = [NSPipe pipe];
    NSFileHandle *readHandle = [newPipe fileHandleForReading];
    NSData *inData = nil;
    NSString* returnValue = nil;

    NSTask * unixTask = [[NSTask alloc] init];
    [unixTask setStandardOutput:newPipe];
    [unixTask setLaunchPath:@"/bin/csh"];
    [unixTask setArguments:[NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"-c", command , nil]]; 
    [unixTask launch];
    [unixTask waitUntilExit];
    int status = [unixTask terminationStatus];

    while ((inData = [readHandle availableData]) && [inData length]) {

        returnValue= [[NSString alloc] 
                      initWithData:inData encoding:[NSString defaultCStringEncoding]];

        returnValue = [returnValue substringToIndex:[returnValue length]-1];

        NSLog(@"%@",returnValue);
    }

    return returnValue;

}