Launch an app on OS X with command line

Question

I want to launch an app on OSX from a script  I need pass it command line arguments  Unfortunately  open doesn t accept command line args   The only option I can think of is to use nohup myApp  gt   dev null  amp  to launch my app so it can exist independently of the script that launches it   Any better suggestions

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In case your app needs to work on files  what you would normally expect to pass as    myApp   jpg   you would do it like this   open   jpg -a myApp

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In OS X 10 6  the open command was enhanced to allow passing of arguments to the application   open   AppName app --args -AppCommandLineArg   But for older versions of Mac OS X  and because app bundles aren t designed to be passed command line arguments  the conventional mechanism is to use Apple Events for files like here for Cocoa apps or here for Carbon apps  You could also probably do something kludgey by passing parameters in using environment variables

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I wanted to have two separate instances of Chrome running  each using its own profile  I wanted to be able to start them from Spotlight  as is my habit for starting Mac apps  In other words  I needed two regular Mac applications  regChrome for normal browsing and altChrome to use the special profile  to be easily started by keying  -space to bring up Spotlight  then  reg  or  alt   then Enter   I suppose the brute-force way to accomplish the above goal would be to make two copies of the Google Chrome application bundle under the respective names  But that s ugly and complicates updating   What I ended up with was two AppleScript applications containing two commands each  Here is the one for altChrome   do shell script  cd  Applications Google   Chrome app Contents Resources   rm app icns  ln  Users garbuck local chromeLaunchers Chrome-swirl icns app icns  do shell script   Applications Google   Chrome app Contents MacOS Google   Chrome --user-data-dir  Users garbuck altChrome  gt  dev null 2 gt  amp 1  amp     The second line starts Chrome with the alternate profile  the --user-data-dir parameter    The first line is an unsuccessful attempt to give the two applications distinct icons  Initially  it appears to work fine  However  sooner or later  Chrome rereads its icon file and gets the one corresponding to whichever of the two apps was started last  resulting in two running applications with the same icon  But I haven t bothered to try to fix it     I keep the two browsers on separate desktops  and navigating between them hasn t been a problem

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I would recommend the technique that MathieuK offers  In my case  I needed to try it with Chromium    gt  Chromium app Contents MacOS Chromium --enable-remote-fonts   I realize this doesn t solve the OP s problem  but hopefully it saves someone else s time

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Why not just set add path to to the bin of the app  For MacVim  I did the following    export PATH  Applications MacVim app Contents bin  PATH   An alias  is another option I tried   alias mvim   Applications MacVim app Contents bin mvim  alias gvim mvim    With the export PATH I can call all of the commands in the app  Arguments passed well for my test with MacVim  Whereas the alias  I had to alias each command in the bin   mvim README txt gvim Anotherfile txt   Enjoy the power of alias and PATH  However  you do need to monitor changes when the OS is upgraded

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Simple  here replace the  APP  by name of the app you want to launch   export APP HOME  Applications APP app Contents MacOS export PATH  PATH  APP HOME   Thanks me later

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You can launch apps using open   open -a APP YOU WANT   This should open the application that you want

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As was mentioned in the question here  the open command in 10 6 now has an args flag  so you can call   open -n   AppName app --args -AppCommandLineArg

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open also has an -a flag  that you can use to open up an app from within the Applications folder by it s name  or by bundle identifier with -b flag   You can combine this with the --args option to achieve the result you want   open -a APP NAME --args ARGS   To open up a video in VLC player that should scale with a factor 2x and loop you would for example exectute   open -a VLC --args -L --fullscreen   Note that I could not get the output of the commands to the terminal   although I didn t try anything to resolve that

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With applescript   tell application  Firefox  to activate

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Beginning with OS X Yosemite  we can now use AppleScript and Automator to automate complex tasks  JavaScript for automation can now be used as the scripting language   This page gives a good example example script that can be written at the command line using bash and osascript interactive mode  It opens a Safari tab and navigates to example com   http   developer telerik com featured javascript-os-x-automation-example   osascript -l JavaScript -i Safari   Application  Safari    window   Safari windows 0   window name    tab   Safari Tab  url  http   www example com     window tabs push tab    window currentTab   tab

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An application bundle  a  app file  is actually a bunch of directories  Instead of using open and the  app name  you can actually move in to it and start the actual binary  For instance     cd  Applications LittleSnapper app    ls Contents   cd Contents MacOS      LittleSnapper   That is the actual binary that might accept arguments  or not  in LittleSnapper s case

[macos] Launch an app on OS X with command line

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