Jay is presenting a legitimate engineering problem with some
interesting constraints. Let's put philosophy aside and solve his
problem.
He wants:
- API compatibility with an application main() that expects argc and
argv.
That's easy; Mac OS X sends every launchable app these parameters.
- Some way for the end user to set these as needed.
Windows has this built in; Mac doesn't.
- Not require the user to go to the command line.
That's the usual Mac OS X way to provide Unixisms in user-land.
He doesn't want this.
I suggest that he use the one thing about an app that a user can
modify, that is, its Finder comments. Luckily Spotlight in Mac OS X
10.4 gives us a very convenient API to get the value of whatever the
user has set by choosing the app in the Finder, doing a Get Info, and
typing a string into Comments.
So let's just make this the extra args field for his purposes.
Change main to appMain (to move it aside) and write a new main like
this:
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
#ifdef TARGET_OS_MAC
int myArgCount;
char *myArgVector[20];
char *emptyArg = "";
int i;
char argBuffer[256];
This extracts the Finder comments, parses them into an arg list, and
calls your old main with the argc and argv it expects. It's #ifdefed
so that when compiled on a non-Mac platform it's basically a one-
stack-frame pass-through.
Code tested and works, but cleanup and error-checking are left as an
exercise for the reader. Note that this does not do all the quoting
and globbing that a shell would; you can go to town with that if you
want. It considers every space a delimiter; you can do more
sophisticated scanning on the string if you choose
(CFStringCreateArrayBySeparatingStrings looked convenient).
Mac OS X 10.4 only.
Enjoy,
Chris
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