Starting Bandage using a symlink does not work

[rrwick]

Starting Bandage using a symlink does not work

[sjackman]

~ ❯❯❯ realpath ~/bin/Bandage
/opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/bandage/0.7.1/Bandage.app/Contents/MacOS/Bandage
~ ❯❯❯ /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/bandage/0.7.1/Bandage.app/Contents/MacOS/Bandage --version
Version: 0.7.1
~ ❯❯❯ ~/bin/Bandage --version
This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "cocoa".

Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.
[1]    73535 abort      ~/bin/Bandage

[sjackman]

The work around is straight forward, so this issue is low priority for me. I wanted to report so that someone else who sees this message will find my workaround. Replace the symlink with a shell script

#!/bin/sh
exec /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/bandage/0.7.1/Bandage.app/Contents/MacOS/Bandage "$@"

[sjackman]

Also, thank you so much for Bandage! It's a fantastic program. Very useful. 🎉

[rrwick]

Hmmm, that's a tough one, and I don't see any obvious way around it. I think the problem stems from the fact that I'm trying to have Bandage be both a GUI program (launched with an app bundle) and a command-line program (the binary of which is buried in the app bundle). It seems that when you make a symbolic link to that binary, OS X can't find the libraries it needs, even though they are in the app bundle.

One possible workaround would be to make the symbolic link to just the app bundle, not the binary inside. But then instead of running Bandage you'd need to run Bandage/Contents/MacOS/Bandage, which isn't very convenient.

The other workaround is to install Xcode and Qt so that OS X doesn't need the libraries in the app bundle - it can find them elsewhere. But I suspect that what you have already done is the simplest solution.

[rrwick]

I haven't found a way around this one, so we'll see if Stack Overflow can help me out: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36930120/symbolic-link-to-binary-executable-in-mac-app-bundle