How do I make the dock icon stop bouncing after my app wrapper script starts?

Question

So I recently made an .app wrapper for a zsh script, but when I run it, the icon for the app keeps hopping in the Dock.

The app is basically:

% find Example.app -type f
Example.app/Contents/Info.plist
Example.app/Contents/MacOS/wrapper.sh
% cat Example.app/Contents/Info.plist
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"&gt;
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
 <!-- tell OSX what the name of the executable is -->
 <key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
 <string>wrapper.sh</string>
</dict>
</plist>
% cat Example.app/Contents/MacOS/wrapper.sh
#!/usr/bin/env zsh
# not my real script, but something else that hangs for a while
sleep 10
%

You can also grab it from github.

Is there any way I can get the app icon to stop hopping, and act like a normal app, and just sit there with a triangle next to it?

Answer 1

You want DropScript. The dock doesn't work with shell scripts like that, it expects something a bit more full-fledged.

Answer 2

An application's icon will bounce in the OS X Dock until the app enters its main event loop and begins responding to user input. As your script probably doesn't run a Carbon or Cocoa event loop (See documentation for Carbon Event Manager and NSApplication, respectively), the Dock is waiting continuously, expecting a regular foreground GUI application to emerge.

A script-wrapping tool that I've had success with is Platypus. It can run its own event loop while executing your script, and do a number of other convenient things.