Macos – How to get a Mac “.command” file to automatically quit after running a shell script

commandmacosscriptingshell

In my shell script, my last lines are:

...
echo "$l" done
done

exit

I have Terminal preference set to "When the shell exits: Close the window". In all other cases, when I type "exit" or "logout", in Terminal, the window closes, but for this ".command" file (I can double-click on my shell script file, and the script runs), instead of closing the window, while the file's code says "exit", what shows on the screen is:

...
$l done
logout

[Process completed]

…and the window remains open. Does anyone know how to get a shell script to run, and then just automatically quit the Terminal window on completion?

Thanks!

Best Answer

I was finally able to track down an answer to this. Similar to cobbal's answer, it invokes AppleScript, but since it's the only window that I'd have open, and I want to run my script as a quick open-and-close operation, this more brutish approach, works great for me.

Within the ".command" script itself, "...add this line to your script at the end"

osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to quit' &
exit

SOURCE: http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-2538.html

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Bash – How to check if a directory exists in a Bash shell script

To check if a directory exists in a shell script, you can use the following:

if [ -d "$DIRECTORY" ]; then
  # Control will enter here if $DIRECTORY exists.
fi

Or to check if a directory doesn't exist:

if [ ! -d "$DIRECTORY" ]; then
  # Control will enter here if $DIRECTORY doesn't exist.
fi

However, as Jon Ericson points out, subsequent commands may not work as intended if you do not take into account that a symbolic link to a directory will also pass this check. E.g. running this:

ln -s "$ACTUAL_DIR" "$SYMLINK"
if [ -d "$SYMLINK" ]; then 
  rmdir "$SYMLINK" 
fi

Will produce the error message:

rmdir: failed to remove `symlink': Not a directory

So symbolic links may have to be treated differently, if subsequent commands expect directories:

if [ -d "$LINK_OR_DIR" ]; then 
  if [ -L "$LINK_OR_DIR" ]; then
    # It is a symlink!
    # Symbolic link specific commands go here.
    rm "$LINK_OR_DIR"
  else
    # It's a directory!
    # Directory command goes here.
    rmdir "$LINK_OR_DIR"
  fi
fi

Take particular note of the double-quotes used to wrap the variables. The reason for this is explained by 8jean in another answer.

If the variables contain spaces or other unusual characters it will probably cause the script to fail.

Linux – How to know the script file name in a Bash script

me=`basename "$0"`

For reading through a symlink¹, which is usually not what you want (you usually don't want to confuse the user this way), try:

me="$(basename "$(test -L "$0" && readlink "$0" || echo "$0")")"

IMO, that'll produce confusing output. "I ran foo.sh, but it's saying I'm running bar.sh!? Must be a bug!" Besides, one of the purposes of having differently-named symlinks is to provide different functionality based on the name it's called as (think gzip and gunzip on some platforms).

¹ That is, to resolve symlinks such that when the user executes foo.sh which is actually a symlink to bar.sh, you wish to use the resolved name bar.sh rather than foo.sh.

Best Answer

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Bash – How to check if a directory exists in a Bash shell script

Linux – How to know the script file name in a Bash script

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