What command line tools can I use to get the currently active application / window on each platform?

Question

I am trying to create an AIR application to register the use of the application, and the only easy way to get information from the system using AIR is to use command line tools and clear stdout .

I know about tools like top and ps for OS X, but none of them seem to tell me which application / window is active, maybe I shouldn't even look for processes? For my logging purposes, I would like to get the name and title of the current active window (and application) as a launch.

I'm primarily interested in OS X, but it would be great to have Windows and Linux equivalents in the future too.

If there are no such tools yet, it would be great to get some pointers on how to create them. I haven't programmed the OS level yet, but I think creating a command line tool should be one of the easiest things to do (completely ignoring the GUI framework).

Answer 1

These two questions seem to be asking the same thing if I didn't understand your question. Should be a good start for OS X:

Get the title of the current active window / document in Mac OS X Search for the current active window in Mac OS X using Python