CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonmacosargument-passingexit-codepy2app
Manavalan Gajapathy
Manavalan Gajapathy

Reputation: 4089

Passing shell command to a terminal application from an App in Mac

I have frozen a python based GUI script using Py2app successfully but I run into trouble using this app on Mac. This app is supposed to send arguments/parameters to Clustal, a terminal-based application, but it instead returns an error non-zero exit status 127, '/bin/sh: clustal: command not found'.

I found that my frozen app can send shell command successfully when I execute the same app from Frozen_apl.app>Contents>MacOS>Frozen_apl (which is a UNIX executable file).

Why do these shell commands get blocked when they are passed directly from app? How can I get around this problem?

Note: Clustal is properly installed and its path is properly set. I use OS X 10.9. I have same script frozen for Ubuntu and Windows and they work just fine.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 944

Answers (2)

Manavalan Gajapathy
Manavalan Gajapathy

Reputation: 4089

Quoting from Py2app 0.6.4 minor feature release:

Issue #15: py2app now has an option to emulate the shell environment you get by opening a window in the Terminal.

Usage: python setup.py py2app --emulate-shell-environment

This option is experimental, it is far from certain that the implementation works on all systems.

Using this option with Py2app solved the problem of blocked communication between Py2app-frozen app and Os X shell.

Upvotes: 1

Gordon Davisson
Gordon Davisson

Reputation: 125758

[Based on the discussion in comments] This isn't a problem with the arguments, it's due to the spawned shell not being able to find the clustal executable. I'm not sure why this is, since it's in /usr/local/bin/clustal, and since /usr/local/bin is in OS X's default PATH (it's listed in /etc/paths). Using the full path to the executable worked, so it appears the frozen app is spawning a shell with a non-default PATH.

Including the full path (/usr/local/bin/clustal) in the frozen app isn't really an optimal solution; it'd be better to figure out how to get a normal PATH in the spawned shell. But I'm now familiar enough with Py2app to know how to do this. (JeeYem: please give the workaround you came up with in a comment or another answer.)

Upvotes: 1

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