CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macosbashterminalapplescript
Trevor Burnham
Trevor Burnham

Reputation: 77416

Run multiple commands in multiple Terminal windows with a single bash line

Here's an interesting problem: Using the AppleScript method to launch a new command in a Terminal window fails if Terminal is "busy"; more precisely, it will open a new window but fail to run the command. For example, try copy+pasting this line in:

osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to do script "foo"'; osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to do script "bar"'; osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to do script "baz"';

When I run this (I'm on Snow Leopard), I get three windows: In the first, the command foo is run, as expected; but in the other two, I just get an empty prompt. And I get empty prompts in all three windows if I've just pasted the command in; apparently Terminal is still busy processing the "paste" operation.

Now, AppleScript might not be the best way of doing this, but I really want to write a script that launches a bunch of Terminal windows, in order, and runs a command in each. Maybe the best way to do that is with a bash script. As long as I can create an alias to it, I'm happy. So how to do this?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 7337

Answers (1)

mcgrailm
mcgrailm

Reputation: 17640

what are the actual scripts you are running

I modified your code alittle to test it 

osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to do script "cd Desktop"'; osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to do script "cd .."'; osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to do script "ls"';

and this seems to work fine

Upvotes: 2

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