Terminal – How to Send Args to Firefox When Launching from Terminal

You can use another AppleScript that tells Finder to open files with the droplet application.

For example save this script as /Applications/droplet.app in AppleScript Editor:

on open a
    repeat with f in a
        say POSIX path of f
    end repeat
end open

Then run:

osascript -e 'on run {f}' -e 'tell app "Finder" to open POSIX file f as alias using POSIX file "/Applications/droplet.app"' -e end /bin/test

To open multiple files, convert the list of arguments to a list of file objects:

osascript -e 'on run a
set l to {}
repeat with f in a
set l to l & POSIX file f
end
tell app "Finder" to open l using (POSIX file "/Applications/droplet.app")
end' ~/*

Alternatively, create the droplet application with Automator instead of AppleScript Editor:

Then run open -a droplet2 /bin/test.

The run handler is also used for files dropped on the application. A handler named open does not have any special meaning.

One drawback of using Automator applications is that there is a relatively long delay before they are run.

While writing up this question I made a discovery that might help others to almost fully solve this issue:

• ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist contains TALLogoutSavesSate set to NO

While this is true, there is another file located at ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow.*.plist that contains an array called TALAppsToRelaunchAtLogin. That array contains a list of app windows currently open.

Deleting this array, or in a more blunt way the whole file, and immediately restarting almost completely fixed the issue.

The remaining issue is when the machine starts up any open Finder windows are restored and if you had one or more terminal windows and actually ran the shutdown command from that window it causes it to be restored when Terminal is started again, but via SSH or a daemon seems to work fine.

I don't really think this a suitable solution in the long run but so far in my little testing it does seem to work.

upon further research it seems you can hook a script into login so it always deletes the file: defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /usr/bin/loginfix.sh

:edit, along the same lines as the terminal window it looks like each individual app is saving it's state, so for example if you open TextEdit, make some changes and then restart the machine using the above method when the you log back in and start TextEdit you end up with the document you had open. Looking in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.TextEdit explains everything