Calling an app from the terminal via script

Question

I try to call an application from the console and pass it an argument. This is the script I am using:

#!/bin/sh

open -a "/Applications/MyApp.app/" $1

Somehow the OS is unhappy with this and complains:

FSPathMakeRef(/Applications/MyApp.app) failed with error -43.

What can I do?

Answer 1

That looks like /Applications/MyApp.app doesn't actually exist.

You can test for that in your script, perhaps like this:

#!/bin/sh
APP=/Applications/MyApp.app
if [ ! -d "$APP" ]; then
  echo >&2 "$0: $APP not found."
  exit 1
fi
exec open -a "$APP" "$@"

Answer 2

You can make sure the application exists before calling open on it! Here's a quick bit of Bash to do this:

if [ -d "/Applications/MyApp.app" ]; then
    open -a "/Applications/MyApp.app"
else
    echo "Application /Applications/MyApp.app does not exist!"
fi