When executed in Terminal, a command like the following will close the named, open, app:
osascript -e 'quit app "BBedit"'
I created the following bash script, in file closeapp.sh and made it executable (chmod a+x closeapp.sh).
#! /bin/bash
# gracefully close app
osascript -e 'quit app "$1"'
If I try it...
closeapp.sh BBedit
... then nothing happens.
What's wrong?
osascript is very complicated with shell variables because AppleScript uses double quotes and single quotes.
You have to escape the quotes:
#!/bin/bash
# gracefully close many apps
for a in "$@"
do
osascript -e 'quit app "'"$a"'"'
done
See here for more info and how to prevent command line injection: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23923017/osascript-using-bash-variable-with-a-space/23923167#23923167
osascript is very complicated with shell variables because AppleScript uses double quotes and single quotes.
You have to escape the quotes:
#!/bin/bash
# gracefully close many apps
for a in "$@"
do
osascript -e 'quit app "'"$a"'"'
done
See here for more info and how to prevent command line injection: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23923017/osascript-using-bash-variable-with-a-space/23923167#23923167
No white-space in #!/bin/bash.
#!/bin/bash
: <<'COMMENT'
# alternative way to kiil specified process
echo $1
pkill -x "${1}" -15
COMMENT
osascript -e "tell application \"$1\" to if it is running then quit"
exit 0
The pkill command is a compiled binary that directly sends a SIGTERM (-15) signal to a process name that you provide to the script. Can be done from the command-line without the need of a script.
With osascript, you are asking it to interpret, and execute the AppleScript command syntax that tells the operating system to do the same thing as pkill. Far more overhead using osascript.
Your choice of which you use.
The command-line argument must be the identical spelling of the running application name. It must be BBEdit, not bbedit, or any other spelling because pkill is matching on the identical string in the process table.
The same code as you posted with the BBEdit command-line argument works perfectly to kill BBEdit when run here.
Any advantage to the alternative method? (I realize that alternative is more directly using shell commands, but is this a significant difference?)
Hmm...the bash script with pkill -x "${1}" -15 is not working for me! Here it is (file closeapp.sh, with execute permission granted):
#! /bin/bash
# gracefully close app
pkill -x "${1}" -15
So that seems to be one reason to prefer the osascript method, which does not seem to care about the letter casing.
How make bash script using osascript to close app from command line