AppleScript & Shortcuts

Short Apple guide on combining AppleScript with Terminal: opening Terminal's scripting dictionary in Script Editor and running an AppleScript file from the command line with osascript.

Shows how to add the Run Shell Script and Run AppleScript actions to an Automator workflow. For shell scripts you pick the shell and type the commands; for AppleScript you can edit and test in the action or write it in Script Editor.

Apple's DTS engineer explains that do shell script throws an AppleScript error whenever the command exits non-zero (so test -d on a missing folder errors), shows try blocks to handle it, multi-line scripts, and quoted form of POSIX path for safe paths. He also suggests avoiding the shell where System Events can do the job.

Apple's guide to running shell commands from AppleScript with do shell script, including building a command by concatenation and why paths with spaces break unless wrapped with quoted form of. This is an archived page, so details may predate current macOS.

Reference for osascript with its -e, -i, -l and -s options and a large set of one-liners: activating or quitting apps, emptying the Trash, setting volume, toggling dark mode, and shutting down or restarting without confirmation.

Documents the shortcuts command-line tool for listing, running, viewing and signing Shortcuts from Terminal or scripts. It covers passing input and output files, choosing the output type, and that shortcuts which prompt will pause a command-line run. The tool exits 0 on success and 1 on error.