Programmatically check if a process is running on Mac

Question

Is there any Carbon/Cocoa/C API available on Macs that I can use to enumerate processes? I'm looking for something like EnumProcesses on Windows.

My goal is to check from code whether a process is running (by name).

Thanks!

Answer 1

There are a couple ways you can do this:

1. If it's a GUI app with a Dock icon, use -[NSWorkspace launchedApplications].
2. Fork off another process (like ps or top or whatever) via an NSTask, read the results, and search yourself (or pipe it through grep or something).
3. Use the GetBSDProcessList function described here: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/qa/qa2001/qa1123.html (I've used this successfully in the past)

Answer 2

Ah, I just found the Process Manager reference

Looks like GetNextProcess and GetProcessInfo help in figuring out what's running. As suggested by Dave, GetBSDProcessList can be used if you're looking for daemons and not just Carbon/Cocoa processes.

Answer 3

In the overview of the NSRunningApplicationClass, it says:

NSRunningApplication is a class to manipulate and provide information for a single instance of an application. Only user applications are tracked; this does not provide information about every process on the system.

and

To access the list of all running applications, use the runningApplications method in NSWorkspace.

I would suggest taking a look at Workspace Services Programming Topics

Answer 4

I am using this code:

+ (BOOL)isAppRunning:(NSString*)appName {
    BOOL ret = NO;
    ProcessSerialNumber psn = { kNoProcess, kNoProcess };
    while (GetNextProcess(&psn) == noErr) {
        CFDictionaryRef cfDict = ProcessInformationCopyDictionary(&psn,  kProcessDictionaryIncludeAllInformationMask);
        if (cfDict) {
            NSString *name = [(NSDictionary *)cfDict objectForKey:(id)kCFBundleNameKey];
            if (name) {
                if ([appName isEqualToString:name]) {
                    ret = YES;
                }
            }
            CFRelease(cfDict);          
        }
    }
    return ret;
}