My goal is to execute a shell script by double clicking on an OS X .app, and the Terminal to be visible to the user (my script has a CLI GUI).
Any ideas? I've tried appify but I can't get it to show the Terminal window.
Many thanks.
For those interested, I found the following solution which involves using an Apple Script command.
First you need to create a launcher.sh script.
Use the code below. The many quotes below allow your app to run from a path with spaces.
#!/bin/bash
scriptPath=$(dirname "$0")'/yourscript.sh'
osascript -e 'tell app "Terminal" to do script "\"'"$scriptPath"'\""'
Use appify to generate an app bundle.
Type this in the Terminal to do it:
appify launcher.sh "Your app name"
From Finder,
right-click on your generated app bundle, Show package contents, and paste yourscript.sh into /Contents/MacOS/
I'm on a Mac, and have a bash script that works very nicely.
I'd like to make it so that a double-click will run it, but I don't know the "open with" operand. Please, what am I missing?
You'll need to make the file an executable.
On the first line, before any of your code put in a shebang
#!/usr/bin/env bash
REST OF YOUR CODE HERE
Next, you'll need to change the permissions. On the terminal run:
chmod +x your_bash_file
Finally, you will need to make sure OS X opens the file using the Terminal and not the application that created the file e.g. your favourite text editor. You can accomplish this in 1 of two ways:
Save the file with no file extension (eg. bash_file, instead of bash_file.sh)
Or, choose File -> Get Info and set Open with: to Terminal.app
You should now be able to click on the script to execute it!
I can run a Perl program from the terminal but I would like to run a program by double clicking it on the desktop.
I've tried using Platypus to run the program but the program requires user input and Platypus can't run any program that requires user input. I have right clicked the file and went into Get Info to try to change the program the file opens with. I've also tried to run the command chmod a-x "filename" to get the program to run when I double click it but I've had no luck with that either.
Does anyone know how this can be done?
Your permissions are wrong; you need to set the file to have +x (execute permission), not -x. Try
chmod +x program
Once you give it an execute bit, MacOS should give it an icon like this
Then double-clicking it will open and run the script in your default Terminal app. (Usually Terminal.app, but you could also use something like iTerm.)
I have tried creating an application in Automator that when double clicked, will tar my To-Do.txt file. The command I'm using is pretty standard:
tar -cvzf ToDo.tar.gz /Users/myusername/Desktop/To-Do.txt
The above command works perfectly when entered into a terminal, so I created an application in Automator and put the 'Run Shell Script' action into the workflow with the command above. However, when I double click the application it does nothing at all.
If I run the workflow in automator, it runs successfully so I know there are no errors.
Can anyone tell me why this isn't working?
I have managed to get it to work by changing the 'Shell:' option to /bin/sh instead of /bin/bash.
Works really well. I also changed the specified filename to use arguments $# and can now Tar any file with it.
How do I set up a shell script to execute from the Mac OSX dock? It seems that simply creating a shortcut will open the file in my editor. Is there a flag I need to set somewhere to tell it to run instead of opening it for editing?
You could create a Automator workflow with a single step - "Run Shell Script"
Then File > Save As, and change the File Format to "Application". When you open the application, it will run the Shell Script step, executing the command, exiting after it completes.
The benefit to this is it's really simple to do, and you can very easily get user input (say, selecting a bunch of files), then pass it to the input of the shell script (either to stdin, or as arguments).
(Automator is in your /Applications folder!)
If you don't need a Terminal window, you can make any executable file an Application just by creating a shell script Example and moving it to the filename Example.app/Contents/MacOS/Example. You can place this new application in your dock like any other, and execute it with a click.
NOTE: the name of the app must exactly match the script name. So the top level directory has to be Example.app and the script in the Contents/MacOS subdirectory must be named Example, and the script must be executable.
If you do need to have the terminal window displayed, I don't have a simple solution. You could probably do something with Applescript, but that's not very clean.
On OSX Mavericks:
Create your shell script.
Make your shell script executable:
chmod +x your-shell-script.sh
Rename your script to have a .app suffix:
mv your-shell-script.sh your-shell-script.app
Drag the script to the OSX dock.
Rename your script back to a .sh suffix:
mv your-shell-script.app your-shell-script.sh
Right-click the file in Finder, and click the "Get Info" option.
At the bottom of the window, set the shell script to open with the terminal.
Now when you click on the script in the dock, A terminal window will pop up and execute your script.
Bonus: To get the terminal to close when your script has completed, add exit 0 to the end and change the terminal settings to "close the shell if exited cleanly" like it says to do in this SO answer.
I know this is old but in case it is helpful to others:
If you need to run a script and want the terminal to pop up so you can see the results you can do like Abyss Knight said and change the extension to .command. If you double click on it it will open a terminal window and run.
I however needed this to run from automator or appleScript. So to get this to open a new terminal the command I ran from "run shell script" was "open myShellScript.command" and it opened in a new terminal.
As long as your script is executable and doesn't have any extension you can drag it as-is to the right side (Document side) of the Dock and it will run in a terminal window when clicked instead of opening an editor.
If you want to have an extension (like foo.sh), you can go to the file info window in Finder and change the default application for that particular script from whatever it is (TextEdit, TextMate, whatever default is set on your computer for .sh files) to Terminal. It will then just execute instead of opening in a text editor. Again, you will have to drag it to the right side of the Dock.
In the Script Editor:
do shell script "/full/path/to/your/script -with 'all desired args'"
Save as an application bundle.
As long as all you want to do is get the effect of the script, this will work fine. You won't see STDOUT or STDERR.
I think this thread may be helpful: http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-70973.html
To paraphrase, you can rename it with the .command extension or create an AppleScript to run the shell.
As joe mentioned, creating the shell script and then creating an applescript script to call the shell script, will accomplish this, and is quite handy.
Shell Script
Create your shell script in your favorite text editor, for example:
mono "/Volumes/Media/~Users/me/Software/keepass/keepass.exe"
(this runs the w32 executable, using the mono framework)
Save shell script, for my example "StartKeepass.sh"
Apple Script
Open AppleScript Editor, and call the shell script
do shell script "sh /Volumes/Media/~Users/me/Software/StartKeepass.sh" user name "<enter username here>" password "<Enter password here>" with administrator privileges
do shell script - applescript command to call external shell commands
"sh ...." - this is your shell script (full path) created in step one (you can also run direct commands, I could omit the shell script and just run my mono command here)
user name - declares to applescript you want to run the command as a specific user
"<enter username here> - replace with your username (keeping quotes) ex "josh"
password - declares to applescript your password
"<enter password here>" - replace with your password (keeping quotes) ex "mypass"
with administrative privileges - declares you want to run as an admin
Create Your .APP
save your applescript as filename.scpt, in my case RunKeepass.scpt
save as... your applescript and change the file format to application, resulting in RunKeepass.app in my case
Copy your app file to your apps folder
Exact steps to achieve that in macOS Monterey 12.3
Open Automator
File -> New
Choose Application
Go to Library -> Utilities
Double-click Run Shell Script
Type in whatever command you want to run. For example, try the command to toggle Dark Mode:
osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to not dark mode'
File -> Save
Drag the saved file to the Dock, done!
pip install mac-appify
I had trouble with the accepted solution but this command worked for me.
Install
pip install mac-appify
Run
/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/appify ~/bin/webex_start.sh ~/Desktop/webex.app
Adding to Cahan's clear answer ... to open a shell script from the dock without passing any arguments to it, try:
open [name of your script].scpt"
example:
open "//Users/user/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~ScriptEditor2/Documents/myScript.scpt"
Someone wrote...
I just set all files that end in ".sh" to open with Terminal. It works
fine and you don't have to change the name of each shell script you
want to run.