[carterx]

Today at work there was a student that asked me if there was a way to startup just about all the application on his Mac laptop by using a command rather than opening them all by clicking on them. I asked why and he said he just wanted to see how many he could have open before crashing that laptop. He said he seen someone on digg in the last day or so with a lot of apps open.

Anyways, I said there's a command in Terminal, but I could not remember it.

I found it a couple years ago when looking around on the net. It was a terminal command which would start up all applications under the specified folder (Applications Folder).

Anyone have an idea what the command is? Now that I was asked, I want to find it lol

[Brass]

I don't particularly want to try this myself, but the following should work:

open /Applications/*

(top open all applications at the top level of the /Applications directory)

[Chuckit]

There's not generally any number that will cause a Mac to crash (go real slow, yes, but not crash), though the kernel will only let you have about 250 programs open at a time.

[Big Mac]

Haha. When I worked as an Apple rep i sometimes demonstrate how robust OS X was versus OS 9 by launching every app in /Applications/. It made for a pretty cool demo. Haven't done that in a while though.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Brass 

I don't particularly want to try this myself, but the following should work:

open /Applications/*

(top open all applications at the top level of the /Applications directory)

That will only open the apps in /Applications. It won't open anything more deeply nested, such as the Utilities folder or any apps that sit in their own folders (the MS Office apps being an example).

This command should really launch everything, if you really want to do that:

find /Applications -name \*.app -prune -exec open {} \;