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Asked: 2026-05-16T16:06:48+00:00

I’m pretty much a novice to shell scripting. I’m trying to send the output

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I’m pretty much a novice to shell scripting. I’m trying to send the output of some piped commands to an open command in bash in OSX.

My ultimate goal is to compile a Flex/Actionscript application from TextWrangler by calling a bash script with a little Applescript and have the result played directly in a Flash Player. The Applescript is pretty much doing it’s job. But the bash script doesn’t work as I expect. Same results when I ommit the Applescript and simply put it directly in terminal.

This is what the Applescript is sending to terminal:

mxmlc -warnings=false DocumentClass.as | tail -n 1 | sed 's/[[:space:]].*$//' | open -a 'Flash Player'

So basically, I read the last line of the output of mxmlc, which usually looks something like this:

/Users/fireeyedboy/Desktop/DocumentClass.swf (994 bytes)

and I strip everything after the first space it encounters. I know it’s hardly bulletproof yet, it’s still just a proof of concept. When I get this roughly working I’ll refine. It returns the desired result so far:

/Users/fireeyedboy/Desktop/DocumentClass.swf

But as you can see, I then try to pipe this sed result to the Flash Player and that’s where it fails. The Flash Player seems to open way too early. I would expect the Flash Player to open only after the script finished the sed command. But it opens way earlier.

So my question is twofold:

  1. Is it even possible to pipe an
    argument to the open command this
    way?
  2. Do I need to use some type
    of delay command to get this
    working, since the open command doesn’t seem to be waiting for the input?
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You’re trying to give the name of the swf file as input to stdin of the open command, which it doesn’t support.

    It expects the file name as an argument (similar to -a).

    You can do something like this:

    FILENAME=`xmlc -warnings=false DocumentClass.as | tail -n 1 | sed 's/[[:space:]].*$//'`
open -a 'Flash Player' $FILENAME

    or on a single line:

    open -a 'Flash Player' `xmlc -warnings=false DocumentClass.as | tail -n 1 | sed 's/[[:space:]].*$//'`

    If you’re using bash (or another modern POSIX shell), you can replace the pretty unreadable backtick character with $( and ): 

    open -a 'Flash Player' $(xmlc -warnings=false DocumentClass.as | tail -n 1 | sed 's/[[:space:]].*$//')
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