Command Line Macros

Author: Wayne Rasband (wsr at nih.gov)
History: 2005/06/03: First version
2006/05/27: Updated to work with ImageJ 1.37h
Requires: ImageJ 1.37h or later
Source: Contained in macro-runner.zip
Installation: Download macro-runner.zip and extract the MacroRunner folder.
Description: RunMacro is a Java program (not a plugin) that runs an ImageJ macro from the command line with no GUI. It uses the IJ.runMacroFile(path, arg) method that was added in ImageJ 1.33c to run a macro and to pass it a single string argument.

ImageJ 1.37h and later can also runs macros from the command line using the -batch option documented at the beginning of ImageJ.java.

To compile:

    javac -classpath ij.jar RunMacro.java

To run "analyze.txt", passing it the argument "blobs.tif":

    java -cp ij.jar:. RunMacro analyze.txt Blobs.tif (Unix)
    java -cp ij.jar;. RunMacro analyze.txt Blobs.tif (Windows)

You can also run this macro by running ImageJ with the -batch command line option:

    java -jar ij.jar -batch analyze blobs.tif

Use I/O redirection to save macro output in a file:

    java -jar ij.jar -batch analyze blobs.tif>results.txt

Four example command line macros are in MacroRunner folder:

    table.txt: Generates a sine/cosine table
    analyze.txt: Runs the particle analyzer on an image
    process.txt: Analyzes all the tiff images in a folder
    count.txt: Counts the number of lines in a text file

OS X and Linux users can create an alias something like this

alias run 'java -cp /usr/local/ij/ij.jar:/usr/local/ij RunMacro'
that enables macros to be run by typing something like
run analyze blobs.tif

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