Terminal window in Mac OS X

command-line-interfacemac-osx

Is it possible to to create a shortcut to open a terminal window to a specific directory? I'm using gcc a lot to build small C programs but it is annoying to have to navigate to the directory where my source code is. Is there anyway to configure an short cut (or anything) to terminal to open the window in a given directory?

Update: This problem is still eluding me. The most voted answer is the one I've just tried to implement. But, I'm apparently having trouble putting together what would be the $PROJECTDIR path.

Lets assume that the files are in something like the following location:

 /Documents/SVN Working Copies/School/Term-1/CSC-373/

I can get there when I cd to every thing by itself but I've been using the wild card:

cd doc*
cd svn*
cd *
cd *

What I tried was (things like):

cd /Documents/SVN Working Copies/School/Term-1/CSC-373/

(again, in place of $PROJECTDIR.) When I open the terminal window, I have access to Documents so I figured I would when creating the new profile…

Best Answer

You can do this with shell profiles in Terminal.app.

Select the Terminal menu, go to Preferenes.
Select Settings from the buttons above.
Either select an existing profile or create a new one
In the Shell tab, check the Run Command box and enter cd $PROJECTDIR where $PROJECTDIR is the path to your project.
Check Run inside shell

Now from the New Window or New Tab menu when you create a window or tab with the profile you modified, it will execute the cd command inside your bash shell and change your directory to the one you want.

This is handy because you can create many different profiles for different tasks. If you want to run a large number of commands when starting up a profile, put then in file in ~/bin/ or somewhere else in your home directory and execute those instead. You can also use the semicolon ; to run multiple commands if you've checked the Run inside shell checkbox.

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How to Run a .bat File in a Scheduled Task Without a Window

You could run it silently using a Windows Script file instead. The Run Method allows you running a script in invisible mode. Create a .vbs file like this one

Dim WinScriptHost
Set WinScriptHost = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WinScriptHost.Run Chr(34) & "C:\Scheduled Jobs\mybat.bat" & Chr(34), 0
Set WinScriptHost = Nothing

and schedule it. The second argument in this example sets the window style. 0 means "hide the window."

Complete syntax of the Run method:

 object.Run(strCommand, [intWindowStyle], [bWaitOnReturn])

Arguments:

object: WshShell object.
strCommand: String value indicating the command line you want to run. You must include any parameters you want to pass to the executable file.
intWindowStyle: Optional. Integer value indicating the appearance of the program's window. Note that not all programs make use of this information.
bWaitOnReturn: Optional. Boolean value indicating whether the script should wait for the program to finish executing before continuing to the next statement in your script. If set to true, script execution halts until the program finishes, and Run returns any error code returned by the program. If set to false (the default), the Run method returns immediately after starting the program, automatically returning 0 (not to be interpreted as an error code).

mac-osx – Creating User Accounts from Terminal in Mac OS X 10.5

Use the dscl command. This example would create the user "luser", like so:

dscl . -create /Users/luser
dscl . -create /Users/luser UserShell /bin/bash
dscl . -create /Users/luser RealName "Lucius Q. User"
dscl . -create /Users/luser UniqueID "1010"
dscl . -create /Users/luser PrimaryGroupID 80
dscl . -create /Users/luser NFSHomeDirectory /Users/luser

You can then use passwd to change the user's password, or use:

dscl . -passwd /Users/luser password

You'll have to create /Users/luser for the user's home directory and change ownership so the user can access it, and be sure that the UniqueID is in fact unique.

This line will add the user to the administrator's group:

dscl . -append /Groups/admin GroupMembership luser

Best Answer

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How to Run a .bat File in a Scheduled Task Without a Window

mac-osx – Creating User Accounts from Terminal in Mac OS X 10.5

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