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I have a "login item" which runs a short Perl script. It is a *.terminal file simply because I don't know how else to run a script as a login item (ie. there is no input or output). It works well, except for one thing: each time it runs, it creates a new copy of the Terminal profile. By now, I have about a hundred of them :-(

This doesn't seem to happen with my other *.terminal files, but there are two key differences and I don't know which one is responsible for the behavior:

  1. The others are not login items, I run them manually by double-clicking their icons.

  2. The others are bash scripts, not Perl scripts.

How can I prevent these new profiles? Again, I'm not married to Terminal - if there is a way to run a script at login time that doesn't involve Terminal, I prefer it.

-- Ian

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  • What do you mean with Terminal profile?
    – nohillside ♦
    Jul 11, 2022 at 15:59
  • @nohillside when you open the Preferences dialog in Terminal.app, you get to select among various "profiles", and you can create new ones. It's like a theme, but not only for UI but other settings as well.
    – q.undertow
    Jul 11, 2022 at 16:12
  • Ah, right. I assume the perl script starts with #!/usr/bin/perl or similar? Do things change when you create a bash script instead which then only runs exec /path/to/perl/script? Also, is there anything in the Perl script which interacts with Terminal?
    – nohillside ♦
    Jul 11, 2022 at 16:15
  • The script starts with #! /usr/bin/env perl . Does nothing at all interactive. It's something I would do in a cron job if the Mac had a working/maintained cron :-P I haven't yet tried the bash oneliner angle but that is next, hopefully today.
    – q.undertow
    Jul 12, 2022 at 16:40
  • Cron still works :-)
    – nohillside ♦
    Jul 12, 2022 at 17:23

1 Answer 1

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I worked around this by dropping Terminal.app from the picture entirely, something I already wanted to do even before. I created a fake Application with the Automator and put the Application into my Login Items. Before today, I didn't know this was possible - I had only created the other types of artifacts with Automator, and those can't be run standalone like this.

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