{"id":116,"date":"2008-08-22T19:22:33","date_gmt":"2008-08-23T00:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/22\/is-an-application-running\/"},"modified":"2009-01-13T19:51:40","modified_gmt":"2009-01-14T00:51:40","slug":"is-an-application-running","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/22\/is-an-application-running\/","title":{"rendered":"Is an Application Running?"},"content":{"rendered":"

UPDATED 2009-01-13 to correctly detect background applications<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pass in the bundle-identfier<\/a> of an application, and this will tell you if it’s currently running or not:
\n- (BOOL) ThereIsARunningApplicationWithBundleID:(NSString*)bundleID; {
\n   ProcessSerialNumber\tPSN = {kNoProcess};
\n   while(GetNextProcess(&PSN) == noErr) {
\n      CFDictionaryRef info = ProcessInformationCopyDictionary(&PSN,kProcessDictionaryIncludeAllInformationMask);
\n      if(info) {
\n         NSString *theirBundleID = (NSString*)CFDictionaryGetValue(info, kIOBundleIdentifierKey);
\n         BOOL bundleIDMatches = [bundleID isEqualTo:(NSString*)theirBundleID];
\n         CFRelease(info);
\n         if(bundleIDMatches)
\n            return YES;
\n      }
\n   }
\n   return NO;
\n}<\/code><\/p>\n

(It’s a good idea to test if an application is running before sending it an AppleEvent, because that will launch it.)<\/p>\n

Interestingly, none of the the Process Manager<\/a> APIs can see into another user’s process-space<\/a>; but ps<\/code><\/a> can; at least on OS X 10.5 and 10.4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UPDATED 2009-01-13 to correctly detect background applications. Pass in the bundle-identfier of an application, and this will tell you if it’s currently running or not: – (BOOL) ThereIsARunningApplicationWithBundleID:(NSString*)bundleID; {    ProcessSerialNumber PSN = {kNoProcess};    while(GetNextProcess(&PSN) == noErr) {       CFDictionaryRef info = ProcessInformationCopyDictionary(&PSN,kProcessDictionaryIncludeAllInformationMask);       if(info) {          NSString *theirBundleID = (NSString*)CFDictionaryGetValue(info, kIOBundleIdentifierKey);          BOOL bundleIDMatches = [bundleID isEqualTo:(NSString*)theirBundleID];          CFRelease(info);          if(bundleIDMatches) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3,5,4,13,9],"tags":[303,299],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cocoa","category-macosx","category-objective-c","category-programming","category-sample-code","category-unix","tag-carbon","tag-process-manager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}