Subject: On Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Cocoa Emacs starts in the root directory instead of the home directory

From: Fazal Majid <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 23:04:46 -0700

I have a build of GNU Emacs for the Mac. On 10.8 Mountain Lion, launching the app works normally - the working directory is my home directory. On 10.9 Mavericks. when launched from the Dock or Finder, the default directory is the root directory instead of my home directory. If launched from the command-line, the correct behavior holds.

It looks like there is custom code in src/emacs.c #ifdef-ed for HAVE_NS and NS_IMPL_COCOA that checks to see if the first or second command-line argument starts with “-psn”, and if so, perform a chdir(getenv(“HOME”)).

It seems like the behavior changes in Mavericks, and apps no longer get the -psn command-line argument. Apps are always launched with a cwd of /, even in Mountain Lion, but now Emacs is not taking corrective action.

The solution is probably to do a version check of OS X and if 10.9 or above, do the chdir anyway.

Here is the patch I am using, which is cruder, as it does not check for OS X version:

--- emacs-24.3/src/emacs.c.dist	2013-10-31 22:36:23.000000000 -0700
+++ emacs-24.3/src/emacs.c	2013-10-31 23:00:45.000000000 -0700
@@ -1173,6 +1173,9 @@
               chdir (getenv ("HOME"));
             }
         }
+      /* On Mavericks, there is no -psn command-line argument so do this anyway,
+         otherwise the CWD would be the root directory */
+      chdir (getenv ("HOME"));
 #endif  /* COCOA */
     }
 #endif /* HAVE_NS */

— Fazal Majid

In GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin13.0.0, NS apple-appkit-1265.00)
 of 2013-10-31 on undr.majid.org
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--
Fazal Majid
CTO, Apsalar Inc.
[email-masked]
+1 415 347-1277 (347-1APP)