NTBTask

A Cocoa class for running shell commands, supporting asynchronous I/O. Specifically it's a wrapper for NSTask making it simpler to use.

Installation

Add NTBTask.h and NTBTask.m to your project.

Usage

Get output from command

NTBTask *task = [[NTBTask alloc] initWithLaunchPath:@"env"];
NSString *output = [task waitForOutputString];

Send input to command

NTBTask *task = [[NTBTask alloc] initWithLaunchPath:@"cat"];
NSString *input = @"What goes in, must come out";
[task write:input];
NSString *output = [task waitForOutputString];

Add arguments

task.arguments = @[ @"testing testing", @"123" ];

Run shell script

NTBTask *task = [[NTBTask alloc] initWithLaunchPath:@"bash"];
NSString *slowscript = @"echo 'sleeping for 0.3'\n"
			"sleep 0.3\n"
			"echo 'sleeping for 0.3'\n"
			"sleep 0.3\n"
			"echo 'sleeping for 0.3'\n"
			"sleep 0.3";
[task writeAndCloseInput:slowscript];
[task launch];

Get continuous output

NTBTask *task = [[NTBTask alloc] initWithLaunchPath:@"cp"];
NSString *tempdir = NSTemporaryDirectory();
task.arguments = @[ @"-Rpnv", @".", tempdir ];

NSMutableString *result = [[NSMutableString alloc] init];

task.outputHandler = ^(NSString *output)
{
	[result appendString:output];
	[self newOutputAvailable:output];
};
task.completionHandler = ^(NTBTask *thistask)
{
	[self doSomethingWhenCopyingIsFinished];
};

[task launch];