So I haven’t worked on my WatiN Mac os x port for a few days, but I got back into it last night. The main hurdle at the moment is that the System.Diagnostics.Process class is not fully baked on Mono 2.4 on the Mac platform, because it doesn’t implement the /proc filesystem that linux does.
The correct thing to do would be to learn how the Mach kernel process structure works and fix mono, but I haven’t programmed in non managed C since 1990 and I would be very dangerous, especially at such a low level in mono.
So the first approach was to use the parts of mono that were working, namley Proces.Start() to call a shell script that I wrote to /tmp, then redirect standard out to a file, then parse that file and act accordingly.
StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter("/tmp/watin-listprocess.sh",false);
sw.WriteLine (@"ps x | grep" + processname + " | grep -v grep > /tmp/watin-processlist.out");
sw.Flush();
sw.Close();
Process shScriptProcess = new Process();
shScriptProcess.StartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo("/bin/sh","/tmp/watin-listprocesses.sh");
shScriptProcess.Start();
A hack, yes, in fact a very messy hack. So messy there had to be a better way.
And there is …
Enter Monobjc. Monobjc is a managed wrapper around the Mac os x Cocoa API’s. A quick search pointed to the NSTask and NSPipe classes as a way to start a process with NSTask, and capture standard out with NSPipe, then parse the result.
A much more technically correct solution.
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
// spin up the objective-c runtime
ObjectiveCRuntime.LoadFramework("Cocoa");
ObjectiveCRuntime.Initialize();
NSAutoreleasePool pool = new NSAutoreleasePool();
// Create our process
NSTask task = new NSTask();
NSPipe standardOut = new NSPipe();
task.StandardOutput = standardOut;
task.LaunchPath = @"/bin/ps";
// add some arguments
NSString argumentString = new NSString("-ax");
NSArray arguments = NSArray.ArrayWithObject(argumentString);
task.Arguments = arguments;
// We have liftoff
task.Launch();
// Parse the output and display it to the console
NSData output = standardOut.FileHandleForReading.ReadDataToEndOfFile;
NSString outString = new NSString(output,NSStringEncoding.NSUTF8StringEncoding);
Console.WriteLine(outString);
// Dipose our objects, gotta love reference counting
pool.Release();
}
So this needs to be fully baked in and then put into my Watin on mac os x port and then it should work stand alone, without shell script assistance.
