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

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 > /dev/null & to launch my app so it can exist independently of the script that launches it.

Any better suggestions?

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 >/dev/null 2>&1 &"

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.

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.

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;

I would recommend the technique that MathieuK offers. In my case, I needed to try it with Chromium:

> 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. :)

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)

With applescript:

tell application "Firefox" to activate

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

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.

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

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.

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).

You can launch apps using open:

open -a APP_YOU_WANT

This should open the application that you want.