[GNC] Opening Multiple Data Accounts

[John Morris]

> On Mar 3, 2021, at 11:50 AM, Derek Atkins <derek at ihtfp.com> wrote:
> 
> To open a second file on a Mac (if you can -- I don't know), you would need to run GnuCash from the Terminal and pass the filename on the commandline.

  I have been doing this for several months on a MacBook Pro running Catalina. The command I use in Terminal is 

nohup /Applications/Gnucash2.app/Contents/MacOS/Gnucash /Users/John/path/to/my/file.gnucash

  I actually have this set up in an Applescript that launches two instances of GnuCash at startup. The full command I use in the Applescript is

nohup /Applications/Gnucash2.app/Contents/MacOS/Gnucash /Users/john/path/to/my/file.gnucash > /dev/null 2>&1 &

  The extra commands at the end ( > /dev/null 2>&1 & ) ensures that the error messages from GnuCash don’t go to the Terminal and that the process running at login does not wait around for a response.

> NOTE:  Having multiple instances of GnuCash open at the same time can potentially cause Preference and Metadata loss, as files may get written by one copy and then those changes get over-written by another copy.  This includes metadata like open windows and tabs, saves reports, etc.  YMMV.

  I can’t speak to what _can_ happen, but I can say that I have not had any problems with this. I don’t change the preferences much, but I have looked around in there a few times since I changed how I was using GnuCash and I think I have even changed some preferences once or twice. I definitely change the window positions frequently and open and close tabs at will. All of these changes seem to be saved between sessions. Window and tab metadata seems to be stored locally to the .gnucash file, not globally. The saved reports are common to all running instances of GnuCash. I have made a few changes to the reports recently and they seem to have stuck, but I can’t say that my running environment would not cause any troubles there.

Best,
John