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macOS Terminal

pacman7331

pacman7331

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 5, 2006
177
0
Forgive me for my stupidity...
But how does one from the terminal command line interface LAUNCH A APPLICATION!??!?

I type the name and it doesn't like that... I'm looking in my o'reilly book and it's also not helpful so far...

Anyone know how? seems pretty simple thing to do... I know how to kill and app but not how to "open" one
 
M

mrichmon

macrumors 6502a
Jun 17, 2003
873
3
pacman7331 said:
Forgive me for my stupidity...
But how does one from the terminal command line interface LAUNCH A APPLICATION!??!?
Click to expand...

As another poster has pointed out, the "open" command does what you are asking for.

The more detailed answer is that most "commands" you enter at the command line, such as "open", "tar", "zip", "ls" are all executable programs.

An OS X application like Safari or DiskUtility are not executables. Instead, they are actually a folder that contains a specific structure and set of files inside the folder. The actual executable is stored in the Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/ folder. For DiskUtility, the actual executable is /Applications/Utilities/DiskUtility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility. You can run this executable directly, but the cleaner way is to use the "open" command.
 
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