[SOLVED] Check if C++ program is running as an app bundle or command-line on Mac

Check if C++ program is running as an app bundle or command-line on Mac

Is there a way for a C++ or Objective-C program to tell whether is it being run as a command-line application (e.g. with ./myprog in a shell) or as an app bundle (e.g. by double-clicking on a .app in Finder or running open myprog.app/ in Terminal)?

Currently I'm using the following.

CFBundleRef bundle = CFBundleGetMainBundle();
CFURLRef bundleUrl = CFBundleCopyBundleURL(bundle);
char bundleBuf[PATH_MAX];
CFURLGetFileSystemRepresentation(bundleUrl, TRUE, (UInt8*) bundleBuf, sizeof(bundleBuf));

At this point, bundleBuf now holds the path to the .app bundle or the directory containing the command-line executable. I can check whether the string ends with ".app", but this is hacky. Is there a better way to do this?

Solution

You can query the Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) of the URL (using CFURLCopyResourcePropertyForKey() with kCFURLTypeIdentifierKey) and see if it conforms to kUTTypeApplicationBundle (using UTTypeConformsTo()).

CFStringRef uti;
if (CFURLCopyResourcePropertyForKey(bundleUrl, kCFURLTypeIdentifierKey, &uti, NULL) &&
    uti &&
    UTTypeConformsTo(uti, kUTTypeApplicationBundle))
{
    // Is bundled application
}

Using Objective-C, you can use the NSWorkspace methods -typeOfFile:error: and -type:conformsToType: for the same purpose.