LrShell.openFilesInApp in Catalina.

[DoctorDirk]

Hi there,

I am using 

LrShell.openFilesInApp() to show logfiles from a plugin, but it stopped working. I unfortunately dont know, if this is a macOS or LR CLassic issue. 

Strangely, it works this way:

LrShell.openFilesInApp( { "/tmp/lenstagger.txt" }, "/usr/bin/open" )

but 

LrShell.openFilesInApp( { "/tmp/lenstagger.txt" }, "/Applications/Textedit.app" )

doesnt work.

also doesnt work: 

LrShell.openFilesInApp( { "/tmp/excmd" }, "/usr/bin/open -a /Applications/Utilities/Console.app" )

Does someone have the same issue?

cheers,

dirk

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

Use the path /System/Applications/TextEdit.app. 

Mac OS 10.15 put the core Mac OS files on a read-only volume as part of its changes to security, and the built-in apps are located under /System/Application.  The Finder does some magic to merge /System/Applications and /Applications (where user-installed apps go).

Shame on LrShell.openFilesInApp() for not raising an error when it can't open the specified app or files.

I debugged this by starting Lightroom from the command line, using the -traceback option:

$ /Applications/Adobe\ Lightroom\ Classic/Adobe\ Lightroom\ Classic.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ Lightroom\ Classic -traceback

(There used to be a forum post about using -traceback, but Adobe in its infinite wisdom decided to discard older posts from the SDK forum.)

When I ran LrShell.openFilesInApp(), the following debugging output appeared:

sh: /Applications/Textedit.app: No such file or directory

When I tried to do "ls /Applications" from the command line, I saw just the few user-installed applications I had. Then I recalled reading something about how 10.15 introduced a read-only volume for system files, and it then took a fair bit of googling and Disk Utility to figure out the file paths.

[Use the reply button under the first post to ensure replies sort properly.]

[DoctorDirk]

Great find!

I am now using LrShell.openFilesInApp( { "/tmp/lenstagger.log" }, "/usr/bin/open" ) to keep backwards compatibilty. I have just renamed the logfile to .log launch Console.app automatically.

Cheers,

dirk