who is using my camera?

[Paul Irish]

lsof | grep -i "AppleCamera"
lsof | grep "USBVDC"
lsof | grep -i "iSight"

will get you process ID.

need some function to find which app owns it.

ez pz

[Vince Prignano]

lsof | grep -w "AppleCamera\|USBVDC\|iSight" | awk '{printf $2"\n"}' | xargs ps

This will output the COMMAND path using ps.

[Chris Williams]

When I run imagesnap -l, the camera name is "FaceTime HD Camera". Maybe there is a way to search this without knowing the names. Maybe?

[Paul Irish]

@vinceprignano 's solution is pretty tight

[Chris Williams]

+1 Nice!

[Paul Irish]

although it shows some stale matches:

but it seems like lsof isn't going to give us any recency sort.

[Vince Prignano]

Hmm. That's the same for me, even when the camera is not in use, the file descriptors seems to be open by Chrome. I suppose that's the intended behavior, will see if I find a better solution to match an actual active process.

[Paul Irish]

TBH i'd be OK with dealing with the multiple results.
at least for now.

does this sort of design make sense to yall? someone wanna toss into a function and PR?

$ camerausedby
Checking to see who is using the iSight camera…
Results:
  PID   TT  STAT      TIME COMMAND
 1796   ??  S    216:57.68 /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome -psn_0_53261
 2090   ??  S      0:03.19 /Applications/Photo Booth.app/Contents/MacOS/Photo Booth
96675   ??  S     12:37.15 /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/google-chrome-canary/latest/Google Chrome Canary.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome Canary

[Vince Prignano]

Like this?

camerausedby() {
    echo "Checking to see who is using the iSight camera… 📷"
    usedby=$(lsof | grep -w "AppleCamera\|USBVDC\|iSight" | awk '{printf $2"\n"}' | xargs ps)
    echo -e "Results:\n$usedby"
}

[Paul Irish]

lookin hot. i just pushed it.

thx yall!!

On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 10:40 AM, Vincenzo Prignano <[e-mail]

wrote:

Like this?

camerausedby() {
echo "Checking to see who is using the iSight camera…"
usedby=$(lsof | grep -w "AppleCamera|USBVDC|iSight" | awk '{printf $2"\n"}' | xargs ps)
echo -e "Results:\n$usedby"
}

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