Mac Forum / Programming / Perl / October 2005

I'd think with your email address, you should know which process
Illustrator runs as, or at least be able to find out... ;-)

Use AppleScript, from osascript or from Mac::Glue or etc.

You won't find a single, cross platform method for answering this
question.  Ergo, if you need the "same" piece of code to run on
multiple OSes, you will need to code to detect which platform it's
running on, and then DTRT on that platform.

-Jeff Lowrey

#!/usr/bin/perl
@processes = split /, /, `osascript -e '
tell app "system events" to name of processes whose visible is true'`;
print join $/, @processes

...if you don't mind waiting a little.

JD

"px x" does. ;-)

    #!/usr/bin/perl

    use strict;
    use warnings;

    my $ps = (grep /Adobe Illustrator/, split("\n", `ps x`))[0];
    my ($pid, $tt, $status, $time, $cmd) = split(" ", $ps, 5);

    print <<EOF;
        PID = $pid
         TT = $tt
     STATUS = $status
       TIME = $time
        CMD = $cmd
    EOF

sherm--

Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net
Hire me! My resume: http://www.dot-app.org

Yeah, like Sherm said.

These are the two most common methods that I've used, along with a sort-of
port of JD's AppleScript to Mac::Glue.

  #!perl -wl
  # simple
  print 1 if grep 'Photoshop', `ps auxw`;

  # heh
  use Mac::Glue ':all';
  my $syse = new Mac::Glue 'System Events';
  print 1 if $syse->obj(processes => whose(
     creator_type => contains => '8BIM'  # can't see way to do bundle ID?
  ))->get;

  # my favorite
  use Mac::Apps::Launch;
  print IsRunning('com.adobe.photoshop');

The latter is almost surely your best solution.  No calls to external apps,
is included with Tiger, and doesn't rely on possibly conflicting paths and
app names.

It uses Mac::Processes to loop over running applications, and is probably as
efficient in that regard as the other methods, since they all basically have
to do the same thing too.  But that it doesn't have to call out to another
app makes it that much more efficient.

It can also accept a four-char code, in this case, IsRunning('8BIM'), like
the Mac::Glue code does.

For the Mac::Apps::Launch code to work, you need version 1.90; 1.91 is
included in Tiger, so you should be fine if you're using that.  Older
versions of the module can still handle the four-char code syntax.

A late arrival which hasn't been mentioned so far:

$ killall -0 Illustrator 2>/dev/null && echo "Illustrator is running"

Broadly, killall sends a signal to any process with a name matching  
its final command-line parameter. (See the man page for chapter and  
verse.) Here we're sending signal zero instead of the default  
SIGKILL. Signal zero isn't really a signal at all: it acts as a  
"could I send a signal if I wanted to?" query. If a signal could be  
sent -- that is, if Illustrator is running -- killall exits with  
status zero (success), so the next command in the pipeline gets run;  
otherwise with one (failure), terminating the pipeline. The 2>/dev/
null junks killall's diagnostic in the event that Illustrator isn't  
running.