beamerhyperrefscripts
I have a shell script (which should open some program/file) which I want to invoke by clicking on a link in the generated .pdf file (in my case a beamer presentation).
I tried including:
\href{run:./Demos/run_demo.sh}{DEMO}
in the source code. Then, when clicking on the link (when viewing with acrobat reader) it opens the script in a text editor rather then actually running it. I'm using MacTeX on a Mac OS X system.
What am I doing wrong?
Doing this in combination with listings gives you a pretty nice solution:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{filecontents,hyperref,listings}
\begin{filecontents*}{script.bat}
@echo off
echo "Hello, World!"
pause
\end{filecontents*}
\begin{document}
\lstinputlisting[language=csh,float,caption={A Windows batch file}]{script.bat}
Click \href{run:script.bat}{here} to run the script.
\end{document}
This should also work with Beamer.
If you're working with a UNIX system, note that bat is Windows-only, since Windows doesn't use a 'real' shell. With UNIX, give it a .sh extension (if you want to give it one at all). You might also need to do a few more things:
chmod +x myscript.shscript.sh:
#!/usr/bin/env sh
echo "Oh, the wonderful possibilities of UNIX shells."
Please note that, as of now, this solution may not always work on Windows.
Note also that the handling of run: protocols can vary from viewer to viewer.
Some may not support it at all due to security risks, but it has been confirmed that Evince and Skim support it.
According to the PDF specification for PDF 1.7 (ISO 32000-1:2008), you are out of luck. The action dictionary for Launch actions defines the following keys for options:
Windictionary (Optional) A dictionary containing Windows-specific launch parameters (see Table 204).
Mac(undefined) (Optional) Mac OS-specific launch parameters; not yet defined.
Unix(undefined) (Optional) UNIX-specific launch parameters; not yet defined.
For Windows, the parameters can be specified after # in the launch specification of \href:
\href{run:\MyExecutableScript#\MyExecutableScriptRunTimeParameters}{...}
A clumsy workaround for the other operating systems would be to encode the parameters in the script name and the script looks for its name and decodes the arguments. An example, where I have implemented this way, can be seen in project vpe.
Best Answer
On MacOS
run:...hyperlinks are executed using theopencommand and, hence, processed by the default application configured for the specific file type. For.shfiles this usually is some text editor.You can change the default application from the finder (click on an
.shfile and choose "Get Info"), however, MacOS accepts only "valid applications" (.appcompartments) as a target, so the Bash or Tcsh binaries cannot easily be defined as default application :-(Depending on your case a better solution might be to turn the shell script itself into an app and specify this in your
run:link. This is easily possible using a tool like Appify.