Where did Classdump go? Ah! There!

For ages I've been meaning to learn how to use classdump, the mystic tool of professional Cocoa programmers that lets you detect the private classes that Apple keeps hidden away inside their frameworks. When I recently got around to it, I was stumped: There was no copy of classdump available on the net anywhere. The web site of the programmer pointed to a dead page.

The only thing I found that was similar was Apple's otool command-line tool. which gives you a rather cryptic list of all the information in e.g. AppKit if you call:

otool -o -V /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/AppKit > AppKit.classdump

which is the magic incantation to display the ObjC section of the framework verbosely (or, more correctly symbolically).

You'll get a huge text file that will cause even SubEthaEdit to pause a moment when you search it. But at least there's lots of info in there.

However, class-dump does more. It actually writes this output as an Objective C header. And after a little searching, I found that it's still available via Fink.