do shell script , pipes, and background process

Scripting Forums AppleScriptObjC and Xcode
#1

Hi All,

Not sure if this is the right forum though I am trying to do this in my ASOC App at present.

I have a simple find to get the file count of a folder

set fileCount to do shell script "find /Applications | wc -l"

this freezes the GUI though till it finishes so I want to run it in background

set fileCount to do shell script "find /Applications | wc -l &"

but it won’t run in background with the pipe to “wc”

I would also like to get the process id so I can catch when it finishes

set pid to do shell script "find /Applications | wc -l &> /dev/null & echo $!"

This works but then I don’t have my output so

set pid to do shell script "find /Applications  | wc -l  &>/tmp/countFiles.txt  & echo $!"

That gets the pid and sends output to file but not in background.

Is there a way to run this in background? I could use NSTask I suppose but I don’t want to break the script up yet again.

Thanks Rob

#2

Hi,

why a shell script? With ASOC you have all options of Cocoa. (I’m not familiar with ASOC syntax)

NSUInteger i; i = [[[NSFileManager defaultManager] subpathsAtPath:@"/Applications"] count];
You can run the code in the background with the performSelectorInBackground:withObject: method of NSObject