I spent a good part of last night and today trying to find a handful of leaks in Mail Unread Menu. However, in trying to use the leaks tool, I became tired of continuously searching for my running application’s pid after restarting it. So, I wrote a small bit of python which I called lleaks (not too much of a muscle-memory change). You can use it just like leaks, but with the name of the application, for example: lleaks Mail Unread Menu.

#! /usr/bin/python

from commands import getoutput
from sys import argv

def main():
    
    # get program name from arguments, escaping the spaces
    programName = "\ ".join(argv[1:])
    
    # run ps ax
    output = getoutput("ps ax | grep " + programName)
    output = output.split('\n')
    
    # filter out this program from the output
    filteredOutput = []
    for item in output:
        
        if -1 == item.find('lleaks') and -1 == item.find('ps ax') and -1 == item.find('grep'):
            filteredOutput.append(item)
    
    # there is no program
    if 0 == len(filteredOutput):
        print "lleaks cannot examine program " + " ".join(programName.split("\ ")) + " because the program does not exist."
        return
    
    # use first instance of the program
    program = filteredOutput[0]
    
    # remove white space at beginning of string
    while 0 == program.find(' '):
        program = program[1:]
        
    # get process for program
    process = program[:program.find(' ')]
    
    # run leaks
    print getoutput("leaks " + process)
    
if __name__ == '__main__': main()