I am trying to detect when particular applications are launched.

Currently I am using NSWorkspace, registering for the "did launch application" notification. I also use the runningApplications method to get apps that are currently running when my app starts.

For most apps, the name of the app bundle is enough. I have a plist of "known apps" that I cross check with the name of that passed in the notification.

This works fine until you come across an app that acts as a proxy for launching another application using command line arguments.

Example: The newly released Portal on the Mac doesn't have a dedicated app bundle. Steam can create a shortcut, which serves as nothing more than to launch the hl2_osx app with the -game argument and portal as it's parameter.

Since more Source based games are heading to the Mac, I imagine they'll use the same method to launch, effectively running the hl2_osx app with the -game argument.

Is there a nice way to get a list of the arguments (and their parameters) using a Cocoa API?

NSProcessInfo comes close, offering an `-arguments' method, but only provides information for its own process...

NSRunningApplication offers the ability to get information about arbitrary apps using a PID, but no command line args...

Is there anything that fills the gap between the two?

I'm trying not to go down the route of spawning an NSTask to run ps -p [pid] and parsing the output... I'd prefer something more high level.