How to start up another process in a new Terminal window

Thanks for these suggestions. I tried calling a script command as suggested, but ran into a couple of obstacles.

In a single run of the program, I may need to open several Terminal windows all with different arguments passed to the program. In this case, the script command needs to be changeable. I had considered creating a new script file for every instance of the program call, filling in the arguments as needed, for example

#!/bin/bash
# script with arg a
osascript <<EOF
tell application "Terminal"
do script "runpgm arga"
end tell
EOF


#!/bin/bash
# script with arg b
osascript <<EOF
tell application "Terminal"
do script "runpgm argb"
end tell
EOF

#!/bin/bash
# script with arg c
osascript <<EOF
tell application "Terminal"
do script "runpgm argc"
end tell
EOF

and calling each script using the open command.

But the next problem is that the script file supplied to 'open' must have execute permission. Otherwise, user interaction is required to allow the file to be executed. This is not a desirable effect. I need this to run without prompting the user once the program has started. As far as I know, there is no way to create a new file with execute permission within Fortran.

Is there a way to supply an existing script file with arguments from the open command such that the arguments are then passed to my program? For example

#!/bin/bash
# script with arg
osascript <<EOF
tell application "Terminal"
do script "runpgm arg"
end tell
EOF


where I can supply 'arg' on the fly? For example

open runpgm_script --args arga

open runpgm_script --args argb

open runpgm_script --args argc

My attempt was halted because I could not get the arguments to get passed correctly into the script.

Unfortunately, another problem with this is that it assumes the users of this program will be using Mac OS X version 10.6.1 or above where open has the --args option.

It is a compiled Fortran program. If I use xterm, I can do the following on the command line:

prompt$ runpgm arg1

Then during this process (within runpgm), I can start up several more xterm windows, each starting up a new process as follows

xterm -e 'runpgm arg1a'
xterm -e 'runpgm arg1b'
xterm -e 'runpgm arg1c'

I'm trying to do the same with Terminal and the open command seemed like the only available command where I can start up the program.

Incidentally, if I start runpgm from the command line in a Terminal program, calling xterm for the secondary processes works without any problems. I am just looking for a way to stay within Terminal and not use xterm at all.

Thanks.

J D McIninch wrote:
Yet another possibility:

open -a /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app /usr/bin/top

It starts up the new Terminal window with the specified program, but how do I pass the arguments to that program?

Also tried:

open -a /Application/Utilities/Terminal.app ls -al

and

open -a /Application/Utilities/Terminal.app 'ls -al'

and still no luck.

Jun T. wrote:
I can't understand what your problem is...
and name it, say, "newterm", then you can call it as

newterm runpgm arg1a
newterm runpgm arg1b
or
newterm "runpgm arg1c"

Is this what you want?

Oh, thank you. I have been continually trying to use the 'open' command which was not passing the arguments to the program correctly. By simply calling this 'newterm' script, it seems to pass the arguments as desired. I am trying this from the command line and it is working. But I will check back when I have tried the call from within the program itself.

One added question regarding the script:

#!/bin/sh
osascript > /dev/null <<EOF
tell application "Terminal"
 do script "$*"
end tell
EOF

Is there a way to tell Terminal to close itself once the script is finished? I tried the following:

#!/bin/sh
osascript > /dev/null <<EOF
tell application "Terminal"
 do script "$*; exit"
end tell
EOF

With this, the Terminal windows shows a logout, but it doesn't close itself. I know there is a setting in Preferences to close the Terminal, but I won't have any control of other users' settings. I don't want these new windows to stay open.

Thank you.