GnuCash Not Happy With External File Renaming

[Ron Westfall]

On 2016-05-01 7:07 PM, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
>
> Well I can tell you how I would handle this problem (the risk of being 
> in the wrong set of books).
>
> For me that would be the USUAL situation since I am keeping books for 
> more than one entity and there is no good reason to suppose that the 
> set of books I want to open now is the same as the last I had open. In 
> fact, more likely than not, it wouldn't be. So I simply don't use the 
> feature "come up with the last one open". In other words, I use 
> gnucash "no file" and so always get to (have to) explicitly tell 
> gnucash which file I want to open.
>
> Remember, gnucash will present you with a list of the last four, so 
> unless you are keeping more than four it's just a matter of selecting 
> from that menu.
>
> Look up how to supply the "no file" run time parameter.
>
> Michael D Novack

Hmm.  I experimented with the --nofile suggestion by opening GnuCash 
from the command line using the command:

open -a Gnucash --args --nofile

I figured that if it works I can always package the command into 
something clickable later.  Sure enough, the command opens GnuCash 
without automatically opening the last opened file.

Unfortunately, it does open an empty GnuCash file that has to be 
manually disposed of.  While safer than the previous problem of keeping 
track of the correct files, it is not a perfect solution.

Taking this one step further, I created a new GnuCash file 
test.gnucash.  I then used the following command to open it:

open -a Gnucash --args /path/to/test.gnucash

This worked nicely.  GnuCash opened with test.gnucash even though it had 
never dealt with test.gnucash previously.  By explicitly naming the 
GnuCash file, the original bug is sidestepped.  Now I just have to make 
the command clickable ...

Ron