OS X: support the `open` command

[Zearin]

The open command

On OS X, Apple provides a super-handy open command. It’s a versatile command with many, many uses. Check out the manpage for several examples.


One of my favorite uses is this:

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open -a appName

This opens the application appName no matter where it is.

This is super useful if you don’t know the path—or if you don’t want to have to type a really/really/really/long/path .

Taking that one step further, you can use the command:

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open -a appName [ args… ]

Which open the application and passes it args.


The open command and Oxygen apps

I just tried doing this with DiffFiles:

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open -a DiffFiles file1.xml file2.xml

But it didn’t work.


What About DiffFilesMac.sh?

Indeed! It’s a useful script. And I do use it. It works well.

However:

• it’s a very/long/path/to/my/oxygen/directory
• open is an OS X provided command that has been around forever. (In fact, it first appeared in NextStep—it’s older than OS X!) It’s powerful, flexible, and it’s not going anywhere.
• 99% of the time, I can use it to launch any application without typing a path for the application or any arguments. I don’t even have to symlink anything! It “just works”.

I appreciate that Oxygen provides the diffFilesMac.sh script (and friends). It demonstrates that you guys care about usability on the command line as much as in a GUI. So in that spirit, I’d like to officially request taking command-line usability one step further:

Can Oxygen apps please support accepting arguments from the open command?

[adrian]

Hello,

Thank you for the feedback.

I see that this behavior worked at one time(up to Oxygen 11.2), but it seems it was broken starting with v12.0.

I have logged this to our issue tracking tool and it will be investigated and resolved in a future version of Oxygen.

Regards,
Adrian

[adrian]

Hi,

We've tested this and it works, but DiffFiles and all the other Oxygen tools only accept the file names as arguments(not as files to be opened) and arguments are passed differently to the application by the open command:

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open -a application [--args arg1 ...]

See the open command documentation:
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac ... pen.1.html

On the other hand the main Oxygen apps work directly with the files to be opened:

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open -a Oxygen file1.xml file2.xml

There's also the problem that the file arguments for the tools have to be absolute paths. So you would have to use:

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open -a DiffFiles --args /path/to/file1.xml /path/to/file2.xml

A simple workaround to avoid using the absolute paths is to use pwd instead of the path. e.g.

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open -a DiffFiles --args `pwd`/file1.xml `pwd`/file2.xml

We will investigate and try to remove these limitations in a future version of Oxygen.

Regards,
Adrian