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macosvmwareparallels

Starting a Windows app from a Mac app in Parallels or VMWare

Given:

  • Mac with either Parallels or VMWare
  • A virtual machine with Windows installed.
  • A Windows GUI application Foo.exe installed in that Windows virtual machine.
  • A Mac application Bar.app

I'd like to start Foo.exe from Bar.app.

What are reasonable approaches to do this for Parallels?

How about VMWare?

Note: I've tried using Parallel's "prlctl exec" command, which can run a command on the VM's OS -- but I have not managed to make it launch a GUI application on the VM's display.

Solution

  • One way is:

    You can register/associate file types in MAC OS X to exes in VMWare. So by programmatically launching an associated data file in the Finder it would launch the appropriate VMWare WindowsApp's exe.