Re: now it really gets weird
Re: now it really gets weird
- Subject: Re: now it really gets weird
- From: Jeff Harrell <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 12:08:07 -0500
On Thursday, July 17, 2003, at 11:14 AM, Eliah Kagan wrote:
In fact, if you make a new folder and call it something ending in
.app, and then you double click on it in the Finder, it will look just
like an app starting up. It just won't do anything.
Since we're elaborating...
What the Finder actually does at this point is look for a file inside
the package (the .app folder) called Contents/Info.plist. If it finds
one, it does reads it and acts accordingly. (A full discussion of what
Info.plist is and does is beyond the scope of my knowledge, plus it's
tangential to where I'm going with this.)
If there's no Info.plist file, the Finder looks for any file at the
path Contents/MacOS/PackageBaseName and tries to execute it. What I
mean by that is that if you've got a package called "Hello.app" and you
double-click it, the Finder will look for Hello.app/Contents/Info.plist
first, then barring that it will look for
Hello.app/Contents/MacOS/Hello and try to execute it.
This is handy to know because you can put ANY executable file, even a
shell or Perl script or whatever, and put it inside a package to make
it double-clickable. If you do this, the file that gets executed is
simply exec'd by the Finder; it doesn't get a controlling terminal or
anything fancy-schmancy like that. Sometimes this is what you want.
The only catch is that Hello.app/Contents/MacOS/Hello (or whatever) has
to be executable. In other words, the execute bit has to be set.
--
email@hidden
http://homepage.mac.com/jharrell
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