Run AppleScript From Terminal With osascript

Shell scripts are great at files and text, and helpless at "pause the music" or "put a notification on screen." AppleScript is the opposite. osascript joins them: it runs any AppleScript from the Terminal, one line or a whole file, so your shell scripts can talk to apps and your Mac can talk back.

One-liners worth knowing

The -e flag runs a line of AppleScript directly. Three immediately useful examples:

# put a notification on screen (great at the end of long scripts)
osascript -e 'display notification "Backup finished" with title "Script"'

# ask a yes/no question, get the answer back
osascript -e 'display dialog "Continue with cleanup?"'

# set the output volume (0-100)
osascript -e 'set volume output volume 25'

The dialog command exits with an error if the user clicks Cancel, which makes it a working confirmation gate in shell scripts: osascript -e 'display dialog "Proceed?"' && ./do-the-thing.sh. The volume change is undone the same way you made it — run it again with the old value.

Controlling apps with tell

AppleScript's verb for addressing an app is tell. Anything a scriptable app exposes, you can trigger from Terminal:

# play/pause Music without touching the app
osascript -e 'tell application "Music" to playpause'

# open a new Finder window at your home folder
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to open home'

# empty the Trash (same as Finder's own command)
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to empty trash'

The first time a Terminal script controls a given app, macOS shows a permission prompt — "Terminal" wants access to control "Music". Click OK once and it's remembered; you can review or revoke these grants any time in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Automation. If you clicked Don't Allow and regret it, that same pane is the undo: flip the toggle for Terminal back on.

Multi-line scripts and script files

Stack -e flags and they run as consecutive lines:

osascript -e 'tell application "Safari"' \
          -e 'make new document' \
          -e 'end tell'

For anything longer, put the AppleScript in a file and run osascript myscript.applescript — same engine, no quoting headaches. A heredoc works too when you want the script inline in a shell script:

osascript <<'END'
tell application "Finder"
  set trashCount to count of items in trash
end tell
display notification (trashCount as text) & " items in Trash"
END

Whatever the last expression returns is printed to standard output — so result=$(osascript -e '…') passes values from the app world back into your shell variables. That round trip is what makes osascript more than a novelty.

JXA: the same bridge in JavaScript

If AppleScript's English-like syntax grates, the same automation engine speaks JavaScript. Add -l JavaScript:

# JavaScript for Automation (JXA)
osascript -l JavaScript -e 'Application("Music").playpause()'

JXA reaches the same apps with the same permissions model; use whichever language you'd rather debug. One boundary to know about either way: scripts that click buttons or press keys in other apps (via System Events UI scripting) additionally need Terminal listed under Privacy & Security → Accessibility — plain app commands like the ones above don't.

Dialogs can do more than OK/Cancel, which turns them into real script interfaces:

# a custom two-button choice, reading back the answer
osascript -e 'button returned of (display dialog "Deploy now?" buttons {"Later", "Ship it"} default button "Ship it")'

That prints Ship it or Later to standard output, so a shell case statement can branch on a genuinely graphical question — the missing piece for scripts a less technical colleague has to run.

When Shortcuts is the better bridge

For automations you'd rather build visually and still trigger from scripts, the Shortcuts app has its own command-line runner — see our guide to running Shortcuts from Terminal.