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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.

Michael
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  • Command-line programs don't run Terminal.app, Terminal.app runs command-line programs (or more technically, Terminal.app runs a shell, and *that* runs other command-line programs). If your app needs to run a command-line program with a Terminal interface, either your app needs to *provide* that interface, or tell Terminal to open and run the command-line program (maybe via AppleScript?). – Gordon Davisson Oct 28 '21 at 08:15
  • Yes, that's my question: how to get the app to open Terminal and run the command-line program. It runs the program fine right now, but it doesn't open the Terminal and I need that – Michael Oct 28 '21 at 09:07

3 Answers3

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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.

Dharman
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CRD
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  • Thanks so much for the suggestion, but unfortunately that won't work for me in this case. I'm actually part of a small team of programmers working on this project, and adding functionality like that would impact them and the application too much. It's beyond the scope of what I'm meant to do right now. – Michael Oct 28 '21 at 10:57
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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.

Michael
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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.

Arkku
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