Automatically closing a scripted app

This should work - to explain the process, ordinarily do shell script executes the command and waits for the response/output from that command - that's useful if you want to capture the output of the shell command in your script flow.

Technically, do shell script waits for the stdout stream to close as an indicator that the command has finished.

Appending & to the end of the command tells the shell to execute in the background, and to return control to the caller. This is useful if you want the command to execute in parallel and you don't care about what (if any) data the command returns.

The second form, ' > /dev/null 2>&1 &' goes one step further.

Shell commands actually return two separate outputs known as standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr). AppleScript will normally wait for both of these to close as an indicator that the command has finished. This somewhat arcane syntax redirects both stdout and stderr to /dev/null and returns control back to the caller immediately.

It's impossible in this form to capture any output from the command, but you don't need it here - control will return to the AppleScript which can promptly quit leaving the process running.

Does it work, if you add & or > /dev/null 2>&1 &?

do shell script "binary -option &"

do shell script "binary -option > /dev/null 2>&1 &"

If this doesn't work ... there is some syntax to specify an immediate return from do shell script. It's some control loop type syntax. I seem to recall.

R