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Re: Name of Active Process
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Re: Name of Active Process


  • Subject: Re: Name of Active Process
  • From: Joseph Weaks <email@hidden>
  • Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 10:32:57 -0500

On Jun 17, 2004, at 8:36 AM, Paul Berkowitz wrote:
Well, he did say 'as text' which should have coerced the single-item list to
the same text without the list braces. (I do wish people would start getting
used to 'as Unicode text' though: one of these days, 'as string', 'as text'
is going to land you in trouble.)

Why bother with coercions, though? 'first' is designed for this situation
(OK, 'some will work too, but...) And why use the Finder (yet another
coercion) when it's System Events that actually does this job and you're
(David) is calling System Events two lines later anyway?

tell application "System Events" to set frontProcess to name of first
process whose frontmost is true


My apologies for not cleaning up my examples to the bare minimum. They included concatenations that I should have removed for clarity; thanks for seeing past them.
As per standard practice among some, I, too, avoid Finder when I can, but the problem is that "whose frontmost is true" can fail when run in some environments:

tell application "System Events" to set frontProcess to name of first process whose frontmost is true
-- run from the Apple script menu returns:
-- System Events

But, using Finder's "frontmost application" still works:

tell application "Finder" to set frontProcess to (displayed name of (path to frontmost application))
-- run from the Apple script menu returns:
-- Mail (or whatever)

If your script has control over the environment, then using System Events is well and good, but it's an issue that helps to be aware of.

Joe Weaks
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  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: Name of Active Process
      • From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
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 >Re: Name of Active Process (From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>)

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