I have a little program that I want to make open automatically when my mac is started up.
Because this program accepts command line arguments, its not as simple as just going to System Prefs/Accounts/Login items and adding it there...
From google, I read that I can create a .profile file in my user's home folder, and that will execute whatever I put in it... So I have a .profile page in ~ like this:
-rw-r--r--@ 1 matt staff 27 27 Sep 13:36 .profile
That contains this...
/Applications/mousefix 3.5
But it doesn't execute on startup! If I enter "/Applications/mousefix 3.5" manually into the terminal, it does work.
Any ideas?
From here and into the future, look into launchd
for what you want to do. All other methods have been deprecated or are now unsupported. This is probably a bit more heavy-weight than what you want, though.
It could also be a problem with your version of the bash shell not correctly executing your .profile
. Try putting the command into .bashrc
in your home directory, and see if that helps.
You can use Lingon to help construct a plist file for launchd.
The most general way of launching things on startup on MacOS is using launchd. You can create a plist file to tell it to launch your program on startup, which can include arguments.
You can use Applescript which can run terminal commands, then have that applescript launched at startup.
The .profile
and .bash_profile
only come into play when you open a new shell (ie. opening Terminal or entering through SSH). Also, I believe if bash detects .bash_profile
it won't look for .profile
If you want it start upon login, I would look at the other suggestions about launchd
You could always write a wrapper script that runs it with the arguments you want
Thanks all. The launchd solution is pretty cool, yes its heavyweight for such a simple thing, but its good to know, and as a developer I'm happy to tinker about :)