Turning a Command-Line Script into an Application
What do you get when you combine the power of Unix scripting with the simplicity of the OS X GUI? A powerful droplet application limited only by your scripting prowess.
DropScript (http://www.advogato.org/proj/DropScript/), as the name suggests, is a little application onto which you can drop any shell, Perl, or other command-line script. It turns that script into a full-fledged, self-contained, double-clickable application capable of running on your desktop and doing interesting things with any files you feed it.
Perhaps an example is in order. I’ll create a shell script to zip any files passed to it on the command line:
#!/bin/sh gzip "$@"
I save it to gzip.sh
, make it executable, and
give it a whirl on the command line:
%chmod +x gzip.sh
%echo "something" > file1
%echo "something else" > file2
%./gzip.sh file1 file2
%ls *.gz
file1.gz file2.gz
It works as expected, gzip
ping any files
it’s given.
Now I drag gzip.sh
on to the DropScript
application. Within seconds, a new application is created, called,
suspiciously, Dropgzip (see Figure 5-23). This is a
tiny application with all the functionality of my original
gzip.sh
shell script. Like its parent, it
accepts files — only dropped onto it from the Finder rather than
fed to it on the command line.
Figure 5-23. Creating a DropScript application, before and after
Yes, it’s a simple ...
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