Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / October 2006

Terminal's preferences are set to open a window when launched, "Do
Script" automatically opens a new window instance when run unless...

tell application "Terminal"
    do script " cd /Users/joss/Sites/rails/test/ ; script/server" in window 1
end tell

This tells Terminal which window to run the script in so it has no need
to open its own window instance.

Sign up for Apple's Applescript mailing list.

<http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/applescript-users>

The usenet Applescript News Group is

<nntp://alt.comp.lang.applescript>

Here's some good places to start looking for info on Applescript -

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applescript>
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/applescript/resources.html>

Here's a couple of tutorals

<http://www.applescriptsourcebook.com/>
<http://www.macobserver.com/tips/applescript/>

J

I see that some excellent links have been provided for information.

If you are interested in a book then you might like to check out Hanaan
Rosenthal's "AppleScript".

This book assumes no knowledge but is very comprehensive indeed.

It is NOT necessary to tell the terminal to run a shell script
from Applescript.  For example, the following is a drag & drop
apple script that processes each file dropped on the Applescript
via a shell script

on open filelist
repeat with i in filelist
 do shell script "my_command " & quoted form of POSIX path of i
end repeat
end open

This little Applescript will execute the shell command

   my_command a_filename

for each file dragged and dropped on this Applescript.  Notice,
there is no 'tell' involved.

my_command can be any shell command, and can be a sequence of
shell commands separated by ; or it can be a shell script.

Also the terminal does not launch.  

Of course if you want to have some output displayed on the
terminal, then this will not work for you.

                                       Bob Harris