Running a command in a new Mac OS X Terminal window

user_44003 0
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I've been trying to figure out how to run a bash command in a new Max OS X Terminal.app window. As, an example, here's how I would run my command in a new bash process:

bash -c "my command here"

But this reuses the existing terminal window instead of creating a new one. I want something like:

Terminal.app -c "my command here"

But of course this doesn't work. I am aware of the "open -a Terminal.app" command, but I don't see how to forward arguments to the terminal, or even if I did what arguments to use.

macos terminal bash
11 Answers

one way I can think to do it off the top of my head is to create a .command file and run it like so:

echo echo hello > sayhi.command; chmod +x sayhi.command; open sayhi.command

or use applescript:

osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to do script "echo hello"'

although you'll either have to escape a lot of double quotes or not be able to use single quotes

user_736810

Partial solution:

Put the things you want done in a shell-script, like so

#!/bin/bash
ls
echo "yey!"

And don't forget to 'chmod +x file' to make it executable. Then you can

open -a Terminal.app scriptfile

and it will run in a new window. Add 'bash' at the end of the script to keep the new session from exiting. (Although you might have to figure out how to load the users rc-files and stuff..)

user_1116470

Here's yet another take on it (also using AppleScript):

function newincmd() { 
   declare args 
   # escape single & double quotes 
   args="${@//\'/\'}" 
   args="${args//\"/\\\"}" 
   printf "%s" "${args}" | /usr/bin/pbcopy 
   #printf "%q" "${args}" | /usr/bin/pbcopy 
   /usr/bin/open -a Terminal 
   /usr/bin/osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to do script with command "/usr/bin/clear; eval \"$(/usr/bin/pbpaste)\""' 
   return 0 
} 

newincmd ls 

newincmd echo "hello \" world" 
newincmd echo $'hello \' world'

see: codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/1516

Admin1

A colleague asked me how to open A LOT of ssh sessions at once. I used cobbal's answer to write this script:

tmpdir=$( mktemp -d )
trap '$DEBUG rm -rf $tmpdir ' EXIT
index=1

{
cat <<COMMANDS
ssh user1@host1
ssh user2@host2
COMMANDS
} | while read command
do 
  COMMAND_FILE=$tmpdir/$index.command
  index=$(( index + 1 ))
  echo $command > $COMMAND_FILE
  chmod +x  $COMMAND_FILE
  open $COMMAND_FILE
done
sleep 60

By updating the list of commands ( they don't have to be ssh invocations ), you will get an additional open window for every command executed. The sleep 60 at the end is there to keep the .command files around while they are being executed. Otherwise, the shell completes too quickly, executing the trap to delete the temp directory ( created by mktemp ) before the launched sessions have an opportunity to read the files.

user_22030380

Another option that needs to be here is "ttab"

https://www.npmjs.com/package/ttab

Install
npm install ttab -g
Usage : Open another tab and run ls
ttab ls
Usage 2 : Open new tab, with Green BG, with title "hi", in directory ~/dev, and run code .
ttab -s Grass -t hi -d '~/dev' code .
user_169133410

You could also invoke the new command feature of Terminal by pressing the Shift + ⌘ + N key combination. The command you put into the box will be run in a new Terminal window.

ayaz_231910
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