Writing a Cocoa App like MacJanitor!!

Hey guys, I've decided to try and write a program like MacJanitor to give to my Unix teacher (who also uses a Mac) just for fun. I'd also like to do it just for my own use to improve my programming skills.

I have the general layout design finished in IB, but don't know how to run terminal commands from inside Xcode. Also, it would be nice to add a little progress bar type thing so that the user knows how far the program is from completion.

Can anyone here either provide good resources/tutorials as to how to learn these specific techniques, or post replies with snippets of code that might lead me in the right direction? (Example code, etc.) Thanks a bunch!

 

Okay, I've dropped my expectations for what this program will amount to, and I'm now just going to try and write a program (from scratch) that will send the "uptime" command and display the results. I know I'm doing all of this wrong, but what I do know how to do is...

Create the task using NSTask, assign the command (but I don't know where uptime is?), create a pipe with NSPipe, send the task arguments, and launch the task. That's about it. I've looked around at the documentation, but learning both of the pieces (Task and Pipe) is a bit daunting.

Now that I've got an easier program, do any of you guys have any pointers as to where to look from here? Here's all I've got: (I know some of it is incorrect and incomplete, but it's my general understanding of what I want to do.)

Code:

- (IBAction)daily:(id)sender
{
	mytask = [[NSTask alloc] init];
	piper = [[NSPipe alloc] init];
	[mytask setLaunchPath:@"uptime"];
	[mytask launch];
	[resultsbox setStringValue:piper];
}

 

Ah thank you so much! I looked through apple's development pages but could only find API's, which definitely didn't help. I think the page you provided is just what I'm looking for!