Opening files in Eclipse from the command line(转发)

zhaozhongwei

I ran a query to see all the bugs fixed in the Eclipse Platform in 3.6; it is a long list (4309 and counting). Felipe gets credit for the oldest bug fixed (raised in 2001), but in a close second is bug 4922 (raised only a day later).

This bug is about opening files in eclipse from the command line. Fixing it required a coordinated effort between Platform UI, SWT, and the Equinox launcher. A lot of the credit for what was done goes to Kevin Barnes.

This post is an effort to explain some of the technical details of what is going here.

On the Mac...: On the mac all we do is handle the apple event "kAEOpenDocuments", most of the rest of this post doesn't apply to the mac.

Windows and GTK... Everything below applies to Windows and GTK, though there are some differences in the implementation details.

On Motif... Sorry, this doesn't work on motif.
The Launcher

Everything starts in the eclipse launcher. We added a few new command line options:

• --launcher.openFile : obvious enough, specifies the file we want to open.
  
• --launcher.defaultAction : less obvious, specifies the action to take when the launcher is started without any '-' arguments on the command line. Currently the only support value is "openFile".
  
• --launcher.timeout : a timeout value for how long we should spend trying to communicate with an already running eclipse before we give up and just open a new eclipse instance. Default is 60 (seconds).
  

The first argument is obvious enough, open the specified file in eclipse.
<div style="text-align: center;">eclipse --launcher.openFile myFile.txt