How to manually ‘install’ a command-line based Java application consisting of an executable and several auxiliary modules

installjavaterminal

I'd like to use Briss, a Java application for cropping pdf files. The application consists of a compressed folder containing several Java .jar files. Presumably one of them is the executable, and the others are auxiliary modules that the executable uses. The application has a GUI, but is run from the Terminal by running the following command line:

java -jar briss-0.9.jar

How can I 'install' this application so that I can run it by typing the above command in a freshly opened Terminal window?

One way to do it would be to dump all the .jar files inside /usr/local/bin, but I'd rather not pollute the bin folder with a horde of files, and also I'd like to keep the files together, so that, for instance, the application can be easily and cleanly 'uninstalled'.

Best Answer

Copy the files to somewhere static such as ~/Applications, then add the following to your profile:

alias briss="java -jar /path/to/briss-0.9.jar"

Then you can run ‘briss’ from Terminal from anywhere.

You may need to create ~/Applications if you haven't used it before. Upon creation, macOS automatically gives the folder the Applications folder icon. The location of your profile depends on your shell — the default macOS shell is bash and the profile is ~/.bash_profile.

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Use Automator.

Open Automator and double-click on Application.
In the "Name" search box, type Apple and you should see "Run AppleScript".
Drag "Run AppleScript" into the right-hand window.

Where it says (* Your script goes here *), replace that text with the following code:

tell application "Terminal"
    activate
    do script with command "JMeter"
end tell

File > Save and enter a name, and choose where to save the application.
Double-click on the newly created application.

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Minecraft Server should be detectable through the arguments passed to its java process.

Over at Unix & Linux, the question kill process based on arguments tackles this problem: how to kill a specific java process based on its command line arguments.

The top answer recommends using pkill with the -f flag to kill based on the arguments associated with a specific process. The final command may be as simple as:

pkill -f 'MinecraftServer'

With regard to using cron, this is fine but Apple recommend migrating to launchd as cron is less efficient.

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