Describe the bug

The launcher script doesn't pass arguments to SMAPI properly, so using --mods-path or --no-terminal doesn't work.

To Reproduce

If you run:

"/path/to/StardewValley" --mods-path "ModsMP"

you'll get an error:

unrecognized option `--mods-path'
Usage: open [-e] [-t] [-f] [-W] [-R] [-n] [-g] [-h] [-s <partial SDK name>][-b <bundle identifier>] [-a <application>] [filenames] [--args arguments]
...

This has been seen on macOS Catalina (by Discord user Strobe-#7996) and macOS Sierra (by Discord user GenStella#3149).

Fixing the bug

I tried some different ways to fix this, but I couldn't find a fully working solution. Here's what I tried.

Using open's --args option

If the open command is changed from

open -a Terminal ./StardewModdingAPI.bin.osx "$@"

to

open -a Terminal ./StardewModdingAPI.bin.osx --args "$@"

The error goes away. However, SMAPI still launches without any --mods-path argument, so my guess is that Terminal isn't passing the arguments it received from open to SMAPI.

Not relying on open's --args option

Instead of relying on open to pass arguments to Terminal and Terminal to pass arguments to SMAPI, I tried creating a script that already has the arguments in it:

launch_file=$(mktemp)
cat << EOF > launch_file
./StardewModdingAPI.bin.osx "$@"
rm $launch_file
EOF

chmod +x $launch_file
open -a Terminal $launch_file

This worked fine for me (macOS Mojave) when launching another script file, but I wasn't able to test with SMAPI. Strobe tried with SMAPI and SMAPI didn't run for them - I'm not sure if the OS difference, actually using SMAPI is the problem, or something else is the problem.

Using osascript instead of open

The osascript command is able to open new windows and run commands in them much like open. I tried using this instead of the open command:

osascript -e ' tell app "Terminal"
    do script "./StardewModdingAPI.bin.osx '"$@"';exit"
end tell'

This passes the arguments properly but:

• If not run through Terminal, Mac shows a permissions dialog box to allow running Applescript and access to Terminal (the first time only).
• If Terminal isn't already running, then the SMAPI window doesn't show up until you click on the Terminal icon in the dock.

As a workaround, we could add environment variable support for the arguments. Then you could do something like this on Linux/Mac:

SMAPI_MODS_PATH="Mods (multiplayer)" /path/to/StardewValley

Done in develop for the upcoming SMAPI 3.0, and updated the docs. Thanks for reporting it!