Opening a new tab in the same directory and then some in Mac OS

For all of you that use the Mac OS Terminal, you've probably felt the frustation of opening a new tab and it opening on the $HOME path, unlike the Linux one's, that open in the path you were in.

Well, I've written a script that kind of solves this problem, and adds some extra functionality that I find really helpfull.


#!/bin/bash

COMMAND=$1

if [ -z "$1" ]
then
  COMMAND="cd $(pwd)"
fi

/usr/bin/osascript 2>/dev/null <<EOF
activate application "Terminal"
tell application "System Events"
  keystroke "t" using {command down}
end tell
tell application "Terminal"
  activate
  do script "$COMMAND" in window 1
end tell
return
EOF


First let's take a look at the applescript part (that's the part between EOF). Applescript code is very readable, but what it does is to open a new tab in the terminal, and then run the code in the COMMAND variable in that newly open window.

Then, there is that little bit of bash code, that assigns the string passed as an argument to be run or, if none is provided, it changes the directory to the one you were in.

So, you can open a new tab, by calling the script or, and this is the very handy thing for writing other scripts, open a new tab and run code in that tab, by calling the script with the string as an argument.