Launching Scripts #3: Shell scripts from AppleScript

In this series of posts, I am exploring the various different ways of launching scripts on macOS. In the first two posts, we explored what happens when you launch scripts from Terminal. We already explored some concepts such as the shell environment and how that affects scripts. In this post we are going to explore a different, but very common way to launch shell commands and scripts: AppleScript’s do shell script command.

do shell script

When AppleScript made the transition from Classic Mac OS 9 and earlier to Mac OS X, it gained one command that allowed AppleScripts to interact with Mac OS X’s Unix environment. The do shell script command executes a command or script in the shell and returns the output as a text to the AppleScript.

We have used this in an earlier post:

do shell script "echo $PATH"
    --> "/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin"

But you can use this to run any shell command:

do shell script "mdfind 'kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier == org.mozilla.firefox'"
    --> "/Applications/Firefox.app"

Note the use of single quotes inside the double quotes which delineate the AppleScript text. I have a post on the challenges of quoting in these mixed scripting environments.

• Advanced Quoting in Shell Scripts – Scripting OS X

You can assemble the command you pass into do shell script using AppleScript text operators:

set bundleID to "org.mozilla.firefox"
do shell script "mdfind 'kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier == " & bundleID & "'"
    --> "/Applications/Firefox.app"

Note that the PATH variable for AppleScripts that are run from Script Editor or as an AppleScript applet is different than the PATH in your interactive environment. Most notably, it does not include /usr/local/bin. When you want to use a command or script that is not stored in the four default directories, you will have to use the full path in the do shell script:

do shell script "/usr/local/bin/desktoppr"

(Desktoppr is a small tool I built to work with desktop pictures on macOS, you can get it here.)

When you are unsure what the full path to a command is, you can use the which command in Terminal:

> which desktoppr
/usr/local/bin/desktoppr

Errors

Keep in mind that which uses the same logic to lookup a command as the shell does when it looks up a command with no path. So, if you think you can trick AppleScript by using the which command to lookup a non-standard command, it will still fail:

do shell script "which desktoppr"
    --> error "The command exited with a non-zero status." number 1

When the command in do shell script returns a non-zero exit code, you will get an interactive dialog informing the user of the error. The AppleScript will not continue after the error. You can handle the error the same way you would handle any AppleScript error, with a try… on error block:

set filepath to "/unknown/file"

try
    do shell script "/usr/local/bin/desktoppr" & quoted form of filepath
on error
    display alert "Cannot set desktop picture to '" & filepath & "'"
end try

Files and Paths

AppleScript has its own methods of addressing files and folders. Actually, there are multiple ways, which is one of the confusing things about AppleScript. Neither of the native forms of addressing files and folder in AppleScript use the standard Unix notation with forward slashes separating folders. But there are built-in tools to convert from Unix notation to AppleScript and back.

Use the POSIX path attribute to get a Unix style file path from an AppleScript file or alias. Unix style paths used with commands need spaces and other special characters escaped. You can use the quoted form attribute to escape any AppleScript string. This is usually used directly with POSIX path:

set imagefile to choose file "Select a Desktop"
    --> alias "Macintosh HD:Library:Desktop Pictures:BoringBlueDesktop.png"
set imagepath to quoted form of POSIX path of imagefile
    --> '/Library/Desktop Pictures/BoringBlueDesktop.png'
do shell script "/usr/local/bin/desktoppr " & imagepath

You can convert a Unix style file path into an AppleScript file with the POSIX file type:

set bundleID to "org.mozilla.firefox"
set appPaths to do shell script "mdfind 'kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier == " & bundleID & "'"
    --> "/Applications/Firefox.app"

if (count of paragraphs of appPaths) = 0 then
    display alert "No app found"
else
    set appPath to first paragraph of appPaths
    -- convert the path to an AppleScript file
    set appFile to POSIX file appPath
        --> file "Macintosh HD:Applications:Firefox.app:"
    tell application "Finder" to reveal appFile
end if

Shell Scripts in AppleScript Bundles

Sometimes you are writing an AppleScript and want to use a script for some functionality which is difficult to achieve in AppleScript. When you have an AppleScript file and a shell script file that work together this way, you want to store them together and also have an easy way for one to get the location of the other.

For this, AppleScript provides the notion of script bundles and AppleScript applets (which are also bundles). A script bundle is not a flat file, but a folder which contains the script itself and other resources, such as script libraries, or shell scripts. The script can easily locate items in its bundle and call them.

For example, we want a script that needs to unzip a file. We can use the unzip command line tool to do that, but in my experience it is better to use ditto. The ditto expansion seems to be closer to how the expansion from Archive Utility works and do better with extended attributes and resource forks and other macOS specific things.

This is the shell script for our example:

#!/bin/sh

# target dir for expansion
targetdir="/Users/Shared/Script Bundle Demo"

# sanity checks for argument 1/filepath
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    exit 2
fi

filepath=$1

# is it a file?
if [ ! -f "$filepath" ]; then
    exit 3
fi

# note: ditto seems to work better than unzip
ditto -x -k "$filepath" "$targetdir"

This is simple enough that you could just do it in a one-line do shell script, but I want to keep it simple. You could extend this shell script to use different tools to expand different types of archives, such as xar, tar, aa etc. If you want a more complex script, feel free to build one!

Now we can build the AppleScript/shell script combination. Open Script Editor, create a new script and save it right away. In the save dialog, change the ‘File Format’ to ‘Script bundle’ before saving.

After you have saved the Script as a bundle, you can see the Bundle Info in a pane on the right side of the script window. If you don’t see this pane, choose ‘Show Bundle Contents’ from the ‘View’ menu, or click the right most icon in the tool bar.

In this pane, you can set the name, identifier, version and some other data for the script bundle. You can also see a list of the ‘Resources’ which shows the contents of the Contents/Resources folder in the script’s bundle. When you find the script you save, you will see it has a scptd file extension and when you open the context menu on it in Finder, you can choose ‘Show Package Contents’ and dig into the bundle contents.

Note: AppleScript applications (or applets) work the same way. Their .app bundles have a few more sub folders, but the Resources work the same way. The difference is that AppleScript applets work on double-click, drag’n drop, and some other events that we will get to in later posts. Script bundles have to run from Script Editor.

Save the shell script from above into the script bundle’s Resources sub-directory with the name unarchive.sh. You should see it appear in the ‘Resources’ list in the script window.

This way, the AppleScript bundle can contain all the resources it might need, including shell (or other) scripts.

Now we still need to find a way to access the Resources from the script. To run our shell script, add the following code to the AppleScript in Script Editor:

-- Script Bundle Demo
set theArchive to choose file "Select a zip archive:" of type {"zip"}
set archivePath to quoted form of POSIX path of theArchive

-- assemble command
set scriptPath to quoted form of POSIX path of my (path to resource "unarchive.sh")
set commandString to scriptPath & space & archivePath

-- for debugging 
log (commandString)

do shell script commandString

First we prompt the user to choose a file with a zip extension, and the we convert the result into a quoted Unix path.

Then, we use the path to resource "unarchive.sh" to get the path to our shell script in the Resources folder in the bundle. Then we get the quoted Unix notation, and assemble the command for the do shell script. The log command there will print the commandString to the output in the script window and is useful for debugging. Then we run the command with do shell script.

Environment for do shell script

Our example script expands the archive into a subfolder of /Users/Shared. If you wanted to use a different location, you could use a second argument in the script.

There is a different way of passing data into scripts and that is environment variables.

First of all it is important to note that the shell environment for commands and scripts run with the do shell script command from an AppleScript in Script Editor or an AppleScript application is very different from the shell environment in an interactive shell in the Terminal. We have already seen that the PATH environment variable has a different value, which influences the command lookup behavior.

You can check the environment variable by running the env command. This will list all environment variables. (To be nitpicky, there is more to a shell environment than just the env variables, there are also shell options, but those will be different for each shell, sh, bash or zsh, anyway.)

do shell script "env"
    --> "SHELL=/bin/zsh
TMPDIR=/var/folders/2n/q0rgfx315273pb4ycsystwg80000gn/T/
USER=armin
COMMAND_MODE=unix2003
__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=0x1F5:0x0:0x0
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
__CFBundleIdentifier=com.apple.ScriptEditor2
PWD=/
XPC_FLAGS=0x0
SHLVL=1
HOME=/Users/armin
LOGNAME=armin
_=/usr/bin/env"

Interestingly, we have USER and HOME to use in this environment.

We can also add environment variables to a do shell script command:

do shell script "TARGET_DIR='/Users/Shared/Script Bundle Demo' " & scriptPath & space & filePath

You can use this to set the value of the TARGET_DIR env variable for the next command, which is our script in the script bundle.

Administrator Privileges

No matter which way you use do shell script, it has one big benefit. You can prompt the user to get the command or script to run with administrative privileges:

do shell script "systemsetup -getRemoteLogin" with administrator privileges

This will prompt for the user name and password of an administrator user. This can allow to build some simple workflows that require user interaction and administrative privileges really easily.

Conclusion

Combining Script Bundles and AppleScript Applications with shell scripts can create a powerful combination. You can use the “best of both worlds” with some of AppleScript’s user interaction commands and the shell’s strength in file manipulation and similar workflows. You can also sign AppleScript applications with a valid Apple Developer ID and pre-approve them for privacy exemptions with a PPPC profile.

If this explanation is not detailed enough for you, there is an amazing Tech Note in Apple’s Documentation Archive.

This post covered launching shell scripts from AppleScript. In the next post we will launch AppleScript code from shell scripts.