Run FileBot headless without Dock icon on OSX

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FileBot is a great utility for finding the names and subtitles of downloaded TV shows and movies. I use it as part of a shell script to organise downloaded media files.

Unfortunately, the suggested way to invoke it from the command line is simply to call filebot, e.g. /Applications/FileBot.app/Contents/MacOS/filebot ....

This was causing FileBot to pop up a Java icon in the dock and steal focus, whenever it was invoked which was driving me crazy. Fortunately the solution is simple: Run the FileBot jar directly with the awt.headless set to true. As follows:

java -jar -Djava.awt.headless=true /Applications/FileBot.app/Contents/Resources/java/FileBot.jar ...

No more annoying icon.

4 thoughts on “Run FileBot headless without Dock icon on OSX

  1. admin

    That’s great, thank you!
    Now I just need to figure out how to get Chinese language subtitles working — they never get found. Maybe a script that asks shooter.cn directly…?

  2. Should work, added the transcoding feature just so I can auto-convert chinese subtitles into utf-8 srts. But the DBs I use probably don’t have many chinese subs in general. shooter.cn doesn’t have a full API. There is something for search, but download is restricted to people that visit the website.

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