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what about just using butler?
Authored by: alys on Jun 25, '04 02:56:47AM
If you were working in a program other than Terminal and wanted to open an application, then you are right that it would be faster to use the Applications folder or a launcher such as Butler. However if you're already working in Terminal, then it can be faster to type 'open -a ...' than to switch back to Finder. Using the 'open' command is almost always faster if you want to go to an application AND have it display a file that you're already working on in the Terminal, because you can combine bash history commands with the open command to quickly specify the file name. As a brief example, if you were editing a web page in vi and then decided to open that page in a non-default browser, you'd use these two commands:
vi Sites/dir1/dir2/page.html
open -a camino $!

The first command opens the file in the vi editor. After you've exited from the editor, the second command opens the same file in the Camino browser, using the '$!' bash history variable to avoid retyping the file name from the previous command. This is certainly faster than opening Camino through the GUI and navigating to the page, or even pasting the page URL into the browser location bar. (NB: Use history commands with caution if you don't know much about them. It's well worth taking the time to learn them if you use the command line a lot.)

For those of us who have experience with Unix, Linux or BSD, or who have started with Macs but have learned to love the Unix command line, the script submitted in this hint is a lovely piece of work! By the way, I also think Butler is very useful and cleverly built, and I use it myself. In general, the Mac GUI and the BSD (Unix) backend are a fantastic combination; both have their advantages.

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