I mentioned in my last post that one can use automator to make a shell script an application on Mac OSX. It’s not the most efficient way of running a script, but if you don’t want to mess with your shell $PATH or .profile, it is a convenient thing to do. And it’s simple.
1. Open Automator, and choose Application as the new template:
2. From Utilities in the Action Libraries sidebar, choose Run Shell Script:
3. In the new window that opens, chose the type of shell you want to run from the dropdown menu (bash, ruby, python, and many more are available), and then copy/paste your script into the text area:
4. Save the application to your Applications folder under whatever name you want to the application to have:
And there you go. Now you have a application you can launch in whatever way you like to launch your applications. I use Spotlight as my main application launcher. As with any other application, you can attach your own icon if you’d like.
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