CocoaDialog

A nice addition to the Apple OSX environment is the option to send message notifications yo the user. The aim of cocoaDialog is just that.

Overview

The application cocoaDialog is an OS X application that allows the use of common GUI controls such as file selectors, text input, progress bars, yes/no confirmations and more with a command-line application. It requires no knowledge of Cocoa, and is ideal for use in shell and Perl scripts (or Ruby, or Python, or... etc).

Download

Download the script and save it into the /usr/bin directory with the name cocoaDialog:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $path = "/Applications";
my $cd = "$path/cocoaDialog.app/Contents/MacOS/cocoaDialog";

system($cd, @ARGV);

Please note:

1. Change the $path entry into the location where you saved the cocoaDialog.app directory.
2. You need sudo-rights to save the script with the name cocoaDialog in the /usr/bin directory.
3. You need to chmod the execution right to ag+x

   sudo chmod ag+x /usr/bin/cocoaDialog

Documentation

The documentation contains also examples of the different dialogs. Please read the example carefully because there are some nasty dialog requirements which may cause a dialog to hang into your system.

• cocoaDialog, Documentation.

Alternatives

A simplier alternative is terminal-notifier, but has less options than cocoaDialog. Information can be found on this wiki at OSX_Terminal_Notifier.