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!)
https://i.stack.imgur.com/7XEIX.png
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.
example.sh.app
, not just example.app
. You will get a warning about damaged app if these do not match
.app
and with that structure, it will be treated as an executable Application. If you want to look at the contents of that folder in the Finder, you'll need to right click on it and select "view package contents" (because double-clicking on it would run the application). In the Terminal, it will just appear to be a folder. (I'm not sure if Finder will let you rename the folder to .app by itself; you may need to do the rename in the Terminal.)
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 "
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
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.
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open -a SomeAppThing.app --args --etc=2
it should focus. Alternatively you can focus it using Applescript (e.gosascript -e 'tell application "Google Chrome" to activate'
)