On a couple of occasions now I’ve wanted to read from STDIN into an Objective-C command line tool, and both times I’ve had to hunt quite a bit to find the answer because nothing shows up in google for the search terms I used. “Objective-c read from stdin” and “objc read stdin” both turn up results ranging from using NSInputStream to dropping some C++ in there.

The answer is quite simple really, just use NSFileHandle. More specifically +[NSFileHandle fileHandleWithStandardInput]. You can then read all data currently in STDIN, monitor it for new data and anything else you can do with a normal NSFileHandle.

And here’s some example code, reads all data from STDIN and stores it into an NSString:

NSFileHandle *input = [NSFileHandle fileHandleWithStandardInput];
NSData *inputData = [NSData dataWithData:[input readDataToEndOfFile]];
NSString *inputString = [[NSString alloc]
  initWithData:inputData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

I’m using this in GarbageCollected apps, memory management without GC is left as an exercise to the user.