I am trying to run 2 commands stored in a variable with osascript
This is my start.sh
currentDirectory="cd $(pwd) && npm run start"
echo $currentDirectory
osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to do script '"${currentDirectory}"''
I am getting this as the output
sh start.sh
cd /Users/Picadillo/Movies/my-test-tepo && npm run start
83:84: syntax error: Expected expression but found “&”. (-2741)
@Barmar: The argument to do script needs to be in double quotes.
Yes; however, the way you’ve done it is still unsafe.
If the path itself contains backslashes or double quotes, AS will throw a syntax error as the munged AS code string fails to compile. (One might even construct a malicious file path to execute arbitrary AS.) While these are not characters that frequently appear in file paths, best safe than sorry. Quoting string literals correctly is always a nightmare; correctly quoting them all the way through shell and AppleScript quadratically so.
Fortunately, there is an easy way to do it:
currentDirectory="$(pwd)"
osascript - "${currentDirectory}" <<EOF
on run {currentDirectory}
tell application "Terminal"
do script "cd " & (quoted form of currentDirectory) & " && npm run start"
end tell
end run
EOF
Pass the currentDirectory path as an additional argument to osascript (the - separates any options flags from extra args) and osascript will pass the extra argument strings as parameters to the AppleScript’s run handler. To single-quote that AppleScript string to pass back to shell, simply get its quoted form property.
Bonus: scripts written this way are cleaner and easier to read too, so less chance of overlooking any quoting bugs you have in your shell code.
The argument to do script needs to be in double quotes.
osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to do script "'"${currentDirectory}"'"'
You should also put the argument to cd in quotes, in case it contains spaces.
currentDirectory="cd '$(pwd)' && npm run start"
Below is what worked for me.
pathToRepo is the variable, which osascript passed to a Terminal that was open and it cd into the correct directory. (And then run npm start which is just for reference if you wanted to add more commands)
pathToRepo="/Users/<YOUR_MAC_NAME>/Documents/<REPO_NAME>"
osascript - "$pathToRepo" <<EOF
on run argv -- argv is a list of strings
tell application "Terminal"
do script ("cd " & quoted form of item 1 of argv & " && npm start")
end tell
end run
EOF
Source/Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/a/67413043/6217734
cd $(pwd) &&from your code.$(pwd)is the current directory, it's changing to where it already is.cd Documents && osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to do script "ls"'and you will see thelsoutput from the~directory$(pwd)is being expanded in the context of the oroginal shell script, it's needed to get the AppleScript into the same directory.