While I was meant to be working on my thesis, I decided to update my little script to grab images from the built in iSight camera. The older version depended upon a instance of procfs to be started from within a login shell (which is not always possible).
To get around this, I stared looking for a way to inject a process into a particular mach bootstrap session (After reading the OSX internals book, I knew this was where I should be looking). Now, I will not claim that this script is the best thing I have written… It requires you to set up a rule in the sudoers file to allow the _www user to execute the specified sudo command (as root). I will leave writing this line as an exercise to the user (I have written one version, it is just not completely secure). You will also have to grab the isightcapture binary from off the net, and update the script with the correct location.
#!/bin/bash function pgrep { ps -A -o pid=,command= | grep "$1" | awk '{ print $1; }' | grep -v $$ } function cleanup { if [ ! -z "$MYTEMP" ]; then rm -rf "$MYTEMP" fi } MYTEMP="$(mktemp -d)" trap "cleanup" 15 0 LOGIN_WINDOW_PID="$(pgrep loginwindow.app)" OUTPUT_FILENAME="${MYTEMP}/isightcapture.jpg" sudo launchctl bsexec "${LOGIN_WINDOW_PID}" /Users/gregdarke/bin/isightcapture -t jpg "${OUTPUT_FILENAME}" echo -en 'Content-type: image/jpeg\r\n\r\n' cat "${OUTPUT_FILENAME}"