Magnet, CrowdCafe’s macOS window manager, may be the most helpful third-party application I’ve ever used.

Magnet, an inexpensive and brilliant window management utility for Macs, is such a program. Occasionally, well-crafted applications change the way we work. When Firefox runs this app to open files/downloads, it passes them in Mac's native way, then Automator translates them to shell arguments, and the shell script forwards them to transmission-remote.Magnet: Why the macOS window manager is a worthy upgrade

Automator will give you a sample of code, but you'll just want what you already have: transmission-remote -a (double-quotes allow correct forwarding of arguments that contain spaces).

For 'Shell' dropdown: pick the shell you like (probably /bin/sh, judging by your question).

For 'Pass input' dropdown: choose 'As arguments' <- I think that's the step you are missing.

Find the Action 'Run Shell Script', and drag or double-click to add it.

Start up Automator, selecting Application for 'Choose a template for your workflow'.

Automator can translate these to command line arguments. Apparently Firefox on Mac, for its 'Open With' applications, doesn't pass arguments via command line or environment variables or any other unix-like method. I got it to work, and I think you were missing a small step. I'm on 19.0.2 (latest), OSX 10.8.2 in case anybody else chimes in. Perhaps it is my Firefox settings (about:config?). I've tried the following but only blanks are sent: echo > ~/somefile and echo '$*' > ~/somefile with and without quotes. I've also tried creating a wrapper shell script and naming it helper.app to no avail.Īlternatively, can Firefox use something like this as a protocol handler, where I can pass in %s? open Transmission.app -args %sĮDIT: DS answer apparently works on Snow Leopard and Lion, but I'm still problems with blank arguments being sent from Firefox. I assume Firefox is doing something like: Transmission.app %s, but I can't tell how Firefox is passing arguments to the helper app. However, pass arguments to this requires: open Transmission.app -args magnet:etc

Choose Transmission.app in Firefox when using it for magnet links.

Transmission-remote -a the Automator script as Transmission.app

Use Automator to run a shell script with the following: I think I need to make a packaged app that accepts arguments, and here's what I did so far: How do I open magnet links in Firefox with a command line app, namely transmission-remote?

Magnet app macos