I am fairly new to Mac OSX, and am trying to create an .app file to run in the Applications folder. I'm using MacOS Big Sur, and this will just be run on a Mac (it doesn't need to be cross platform). There is a jar file that executes by running a shell script, as well as a few extra resource files, so ultimately I'd like to bundle this all together in something like a dmg so that I can share it easily with a few other people.
I followed the advice given here and here to set it all up, and almost everything works. The program starts when I double click on the .app file, but without a terminal window. Unfortunately I need the terminal window to open because I use it to log messages to the user.
Terminal is the default app for the shell script, and a terminal does open when I run the shell script directly by double-clicking on it. The script file works with an .sh extension and without one, though I get an error trying to run the .app if the script has an .sh extension. Everything has execute permissions. I went through the Info.plist docs but couldn't find anything about the Terminal. I also tried creating the .app with Automator, but with the same result.
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated, as at the moment I'm completely stuck. As I said, ultimately I want to have a way of sharing this with others who may not be very computer-savvy (e.g. they're used to just downloading things from the App Store and wouldn't be able to install things using the command line). So if I'm going about this all wrong or there's an easier way, then let me know that too.
Unfortunately I need the terminal window to open because I use it to log messages to the user.
If this is all you want the Terminal app for then you don’t need it all.
The Terminal app is a GUI app which runs a shell using standard OS calls, passes keyboard input to that shell (and hence any commands it in turns invokes) via a pipe, and reads the output of the shell (and hence...) and displays it in a window.
You can run your shell script direct from your own app, collect the output, and dimply that output in a window in your app.
In Objective-C the classes you want to look up are NSTask, to run a shell passing it your shell script, and NSPipe, to create pipes needed.
There are plenty of Q & A’s on SO about NSTask/NSPipe, here is one and here is another which uses Swift.
Note that both of the above read all of the output before converting it to a string which can then be displayed in a window or otherwise processed. This is not required and if you have a long running shell script and wish to display output as it runs you can read shorter chunks from the pipe. Read the documentation to see how to do this.
I'm posting my solution in case it helps anyone in the future. As the comments/answers said, what I really needed to know was how to get my app to open a terminal window. Obviously by creating the app manually (creating the folder structure and minimal Info.plist) I was missing some key elements.
I tried to generate one using Xcode. I'm sure it's pretty straightforward, but I got bogged down trying to work out the Swift code.
What worked for me was creating an AppleScript using Script Editor. The script simply tells the Terminal program to run my bash script:
tell application "Terminal"
do script "/Applications/{name of app}/Contents/MacOS/run.sh;exit"
end tell
The key is that Script Editor can save this as an app to the Applications folder, which means it creates the necessary folder structure and files. After that I could just copy my program files into the MacOS folder, which is where my bash script looks for everything.
One option might be to give the script file the extension .command, e.g., and then open that, e.g.:
open myscript.command
The myscript.command file needs execute permissions (chmod a+x myscript.command).
These .command files can also be double-clicked in Finder to execute them in a new Terminal window.
Related
I managed to make Firefox to follow specific protocol links (oxygen:/...) and use an application to open them. As the Mac OS X oXygen XML Developer app doesn't accept arguments, I need to use a shell script that is shipped together with oXygen itself. Given Firefox doesn't like shell scripts, I needed to write an Automator application 'Run Shell Script'. As I was having trouble to get it to work, I decided to use a stub code, with osascript, just to debug variables.
My current script looks like:
osascript -e 'display alert "'"$1"'"'
and it is defined as a bash script, receiving data as arguments.
When I click the link the dialog of osscript appears, but with an empty message. So, I am not sure how the URL is being passed to the application itself. I tried, also, with receiving data as stdin, but with no lock. I got to the point of writing a script that dumped all the parameters and STDIN to a file, but it ends up always empty.
Thank you for any hint.
I wrote a shell script that I'm distributing to my friends. On my computer, it works great, because I set the default application for shell scripts to be Terminal. However, when my friends open it, the script opens in TextEdit. Is there a way to add an argument to the shell script before it launches so it opens in Terminal instead of a text editor?
Thanks
PS, I did chmod a+x to the file. I also made sure to add #!/bin/sh to the script. I've also been testing with using the extensions .command, .cmd, and .tool. That would solve my problem except then Gatekeeper won't let the script run because I'm not a registered Apple Developer.
If there were a way to make double-clicking a file run it, then that would be the sort of security hole that Gatekeeper is designed to prevent. So, Apple has plugged any such holes they can think of.
Send the file to your friends as a .command file and tell them to right-click or Control-click on it and choose Open. This will change the Gatekeeper dialog to a warning, but with an "Open" button to let them go ahead and open it anyway. The system will prompt them for an administrator password to record the grant of permission in a permanent way. They'll be able to open with a simple double-click from then on.
This may be a basic question. I have written a small perl script to run on a Mac running OS X which can be called from the finder by double clicking in the normal way. The file is executable and contains starts with #!/usr/bin/perl and input and output is via the clipboard. This all works but automatically opens a terminal window which the user must then close once execution is finished.
Is there an easy way to run this program as an application without opening a terminal? Can one do this with the native OS X perl? Or do I need to download something? Since the program will also be used by other users, the simpler the solution to better.
With the application "AppleScript Editor" : open it
Copy/paste this script
tell me to path to resource "this Name.pl" in directory "Scripts"
do shell script (quoted form of POSIX path of the result)
In the first line, change the name "this Name.pl" by the name of your perl file.
Save as --> Application
In the Finder :
Copy your perl file (executable) to the folder "/Contents/Resources/Scripts" of the created application
For Win32/Linux/or Mac use http://www.cavapackager.com/
If you're distributing your application to others, Platypus includes an installer to build free-standing apps around scripts.
Platypus supports Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Swift, Expect, Tcl, AppleScript or any other user-specified interpreter. It is free, open-source software distributed under the terms of the three-clause BSD license. It can run silently (without opening a terminal window, as you require), or can display graphical feedback of script execution as progress bar, text window with script output, droplet, WebKit HTML rendering or status item menu.
I have a shell script, which I launch several times during work everyday. I do this by launching terminal, and launching the script from within. However, I would like to be able to launch it (from within a terminal) with a global OSX keyboard shortcut (Cmd+Shift+R say).
There are quite a few applications which work in this manner already (for eg. EverNote, RemindMeLater, even the default Cmd-Space which brings up the search utility) and hence, I am guessing this should be at least theoretically possible.
Could someone please tell me if and how this can be done?
Instead of using a global shortcut key, maybe try creating an applescript that runs the shell script? So just open at AppleScript Editor, and enter something like this.
do shell script "//Your script";
Then save it as an application in the format drop down.
After that, you can run the script just by opening up the application with something like spotlight.
I am from a windows background and trying to help a mac user friend to backup her pictures, docs, etc. onto an external drive. In windows, I would accomplish this by creating a simple batch file with an xcopy command and have a shortcut on the desktop that pointed to that .bat file when double clicked. However, in the mac world I am having significant trouble finding how to do this. I have searched repeatedly to find the mac equivalent, but all I find are sites saying things like "there are so many options on a mac - use one of them." However, none have ever given a specific solution nor pointed to a specific solution. Anyone here know of a specific step by step process to accomplish this? I simply want to be able to have her double click an icon on the desktop and have it copy her personal documents (not application settings or other overhead) to her external hard drive. Any help would be appreciated.
Create the batch file, which is usually called a shell script.
Enter all the commands that you want to run.
Set the executable bit, this is done with chmod +x path-to-the-file in Terminal.
Show info for the script and set Terminal to the application which should open it.
However, what I've done in similar situations and that I would recommend that you do is that I've created a shell script and instead of using Terminal I've initiated it from an AppleScript application. You can of course embed the entire shell script in the AppleScript as well. Basically it will look something like the following:
on run
do shell script "rsync -av ~/Pictures /Volume/Backup"
end run
Repeat the do shell ... line for each folder that you want to copy, or call the shell script itself. Then use AppleScript Editor which is included with Mac OS X and save it as an actual application.