Mac OS X Terminal startup without a window

Question

I'm curious if anyone has found a good way to have the Terminal app on a Mac open without opening a window. The startup preference has the options "New window with settings:" or open a specific window group, but I would prefer it just open nothing to begin with. I've tried saving a window group with no windows in it, but it reverts to just opening a default window again.

Answer 1

I couldn't find any option to prevent a window from opening when Terminal is started, but you could check whether the current bash session was started at exactly the same time Terminal was started. If that's the case, the bash session should exit.

You will see a window appearing and disappearing for a fraction of a second, though.

Add the following code (tested on Mac OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard) [see my note below] and OS X 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion)) to the beginning of your ~/.bash_profile:

shell_started=$(ps -A -o lstart $$ | grep -v STARTED)
terminal_started=$(ps -A -o lstart $(ps -A -o pid -o command | grep '/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/MacOS/Terminal -psn' | grep -v grep | cut -d '/' -f 1) | grep -v STARTED)
if [ "X$shell_started" == "X$terminal_started" ]; then exit; fi

Code explanation:

shell_started=$(ps -A -o lstart $$ | grep -v STARTED) : execute ps to print when process identifed by variable $$ started ($$ expands to the PID ot this bash session). Then filter out the header (which contains the word STARTED). Assign resulting value to variable shell_started.

ps -A -o pid -o command | grep '/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/MacOS/Terminal -psn' | grep -v grep | cut -d '/' -f 1 : execute ps to print all process command names, select the one that matches the full path to Terminal, filter out any spurious grep processes and extract process ID with cut.

terminal_started=$(ps -A -o lstart $(...) | grep -v STARTED) : execute ps to print when process Terminal started, and filter out the header (which contains the word STARTED).

(I had to create terminal_started in two steps to get rid of TABs ps added to the output.)

if [ "X$shell_started" == "X$terminal_started" ]; then exit; fi : Compare both dates and if equal, exit the shell, that is, close the Terminal window.

If it is not working for you (as it was the case for the OP, who uses Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard)), try:

shell_started=$(ps -A -o lstart $$ | grep -v STARTED)
terminal_started=$(ps -A -o lstart $(ps -A -o pid -o command | grep '/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/MacOS/Terminal -psn' | grep -v grep | tail -n 1| cut -d '/' -f 1) | grep -v STARTED)
if [ "X$shell_started" == "X$terminal_started" ]; then exit; fi

(The only difference here is a tail in terminal_started which selects the last entry printed by ps, in case there's more than one.)

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Note for Mac OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard): On my old PowerBook G4 I noticed that sometimes there was a one sec difference between the starting times of Terminal and the current bash session. If you are running into similar problems with a slow computer, add these three lines lines to the end of the code above:

one_second_before=$(expr "$shell_started" : '.*:\([0-9][0-9]\) .*' - 1)
shell_started_one_second_before=$(echo $shell_started | sed 's/\(.*:\)\([0-9][0-9]\)\( .*\)/\1'$one_second_before'\3/')
if [ "X$shell_started_one_second_before" == "X$terminal_started" ]; then exit; fi

There's a boundary condition this code doesn't handle well, namely, when the shell was started in second 0, but I didn't want to add further complexity.