appdir

Note: This is obsolete, especially with iOS 8 changing the layout of apps on disk. Use my iosapplist package instead.

iosapplist is also cross-platform; you can use it with a copy of an iOS /var/mobile directory or the Applications or Containers directories inside of it, or even with the data directory of an iOS Simulator instance. It is available in PyPI:

sudo pip install --pre iosapplist

This is a simple Python script that outputs the absolute path of any installed App Store app.

The reason I wrote this is because I found myself working with App Store apps on the command line and I wanted a quick way to find out what directory the app is stored in.

The problem is that each app is stored in /var/mobile/Applications/(a random GUID) and that GUID says nothing about the app itself.  This script works by iterating through each of these directories and finding out which one, if any, has a subdirectory for the app in question.

Download

Requirements

• A jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch running iPhoneOS 2.0
• Python (available through Cydia)
• One or more App Store apps installed on your device

Usage

• Copy the script into /usr/bin on your phone.  (You’ll need to log in as root first.)
• Run appdir (name of app).  You don’t have to put the name of the app in quotes.

Example

$ appdir Monkey Ball.app

might give you:

/var/mobile/Applications/505E55D8-B023-46BA-9D2B-D9935A7D7835

and

$ ls `appdir Monkey Ball.app`/Monkey\ Ball.app

might return:

CodeResources  Levels          ResourceRules.plist  TexturePackages
Default.png    MainWindow.nib  SC_Info              XML
Icon.png       Monkey Ball     SFX                  _CodeSignature
Info.plist     Music           Sprite               replay.bin
Level_Objects  PkgInfo         Text

Putting a command in `’s means that the command is replaced with its output—in this case, the path to the app’s directory.  So, that command becomes:

ls /var/mobile/Applications/505E55D8-B023-46BA-9D2B-D9935A7D7835/Monkey\ Ball.app