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I'm creating a script that runs several other scripts.

I need them to all start up in their own process (read window) so I can review the output of each, but I also need them to run in parallel, so they can't block each other.

In addition, I need to change the current working directory for each process, so doing something like the following isn't working:

osascript -e 'tell app "Terminal" to do script "someScript.sh"'
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  • You could do this in one widow and multiple processes if the subscript just use standout for their output - the calling script can redirect the outputs to a different file for each script
    – mmmmmm
    Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 15:18

2 Answers 2

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osascript -e "tell application \"Terminal\" to do script \"cd $(read); ~/path/to/someScript.sh\""

should work. You can replace $(read) with a variable.

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FYI, generally speaking, the equivalent of Windows's start is open (man). In their simplest usage, they're each the command-line equivalent of double-clicking something in the graphical shell. open may not be involved in the most efficient means of doing what you're trying to do in this case, however.

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  • My attempts to use open to run a shell script instead cause it to open in a text editor. Perhaps you could provide an example command-line statement for this?
    – threed
    Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 17:07
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    You generally wouldn't open a script to run it, because 1) if you're already in a terminal you can just execute it (e.g. cd <dir_containing_script>; chmod +x <script_filename>; <script_filename>;—note that the chmod step only has to be done once per script), and 2) as you've discovered, by default double-clicking a shell script in Finder doesn't execute it—it opens it for editing. You could however use open to send the output of a script into a GUI app. For example, send a script's stdout into a new document in your default text editor with <script_filename> | open -f.
    – Terry N
    Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 17:26
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    Note that you would've already had to mark the script as executable with chmod +x for that last example to work.
    – Terry N
    Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 17:29
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    Adding on to @TerryN's answer, the open command has additional options that allow you to explicitly specify what application does the opening. RTMP.
    – Matt
    Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 22:01
  • I should clarify that when I said above that you can use open to "send the output of a script into a GUI app", I was speaking somewhat loosely. I didn't mean to imply that it does so by piping to the .app's stdin. As described on the man page (in the examples section), open -f works by writing to a temp file and opening that file with the target app. Unfortunately, that behavior seems to be offered only for TextEdit and the default text editor.
    – Terry N
    Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 22:43

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