On 27 February 2003, Apple employee Christopher Nebel said he'd like to straighten out this problem as reported by Bill Cheeseman:
Because of the different naming for applications and application
processes in some circumstances, we end up having to write slightly
confusing scripts like this (if we've renamed Adobe Photoshop 7.0 to
"Photoshop" in the Finder):
tell application "Photoshop" to activate
tell application "System Events"
tell application process "Adobe Photoshop 7.0"
Suffice it to say, it's still a problem in August 2011, and I keep running into it, so I hope the good folks here at StackOverflow can help find a workaround; thanks in advance!
Given an application name (i.e. something I can instruct to activate), I'd like to be able to pass that name to a subroutine to find the corresponding process name. Conversely, given a process name, I'd like to be able to pass it to a subroutine to find the corresponding application name.
Any suggestions?
on get_application_name(this_process)
tell application "System Events" to set the BID to (get the id of application process this_process)
tell application "Finder" to return the name of every item of (path to applications folder) whose id is BID and kind is "Application"
end get_application_name
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
on get_process_name(this_application)
tell application "Finder" to set the BID to (get the id of application this_application)
tell application "System Events"
set open_applications to (get id of every application process) as list
return every item of open_applications whose id is BID
end tell
end get_process_name
Both of these subroutines are untested, so they may not do what they're supposed to. :S
UPDATE: A process refers to an application that is already open.
The following code suffices. It draws, to some extent, upon fireshadow52's answer and upon a post at MacScripter.net.
on GetApplicationCorrespondingToProcess(process_name)
tell application "System Events"
set process_bid to get the bundle identifier of process process_name
set application_name to file of (application processes where bundle identifier is process_bid)
end tell
return application_name
end GetApplicationCorrespondingToProcess
on GetProcessCorrespondingToApplication(application_name)
tell application "System Events"
set application_id to (get the id of application "Adobe Acrobat Professional" as string)
set process_name to name of (application processes where bundle identifier is application_id)
end tell
return process_name
end GetProcessCorrespondingToApplication
-- Example usage:
display dialog (GetProcessCorrespondingToApplication("Adobe Acrobat Professional") as string)
display dialog (GetApplicationCorrespondingToProcess("Acrobat") as string)
I find this works very well:
on GetApplicationCorrespondingToProcess(process_name)
tell application "System Events"
set application_file to file of (application processes where name is process_name)
end tell
return application_file
end GetApplicationCorrespondingToProcess
on GetProcessCorrespondingToApplication(application_name)
tell application "System Events"
set process_name to name of my application application_name
end tell
return process_name
end GetProcessCorrespondingToApplication
-- Example usage:
set myprocess to GetProcessCorrespondingToApplication("Terminal") as string
set myfile to GetApplicationCorrespondingToProcess(myprocess) as string
set mypath to the POSIX path of myfile -- create this just to compare to myfile
set myapp to do shell script "myval='" & myfile & "' ; echo ${myval%.app:} | awk -F':' '{print ($NF)}'"
log myprocess
log myfile
log mypath
log myapp
-- A process appears to be the name of the MacOS executable within the application.
-- Replace "Terminal" by "Firefox" to see the distinction.
-- Also, you could substitute mypath for myfile and / for : in "set myapp ...".
