How to update Preview.app from the command line without losing focus on Mac OS X?

Posted by snies on Super User See other posts from Super User or by snies
Published on 2010-03-24T17:22:03Z Indexed on 2010/03/25 1:13 UTC
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osx

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preview

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update

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focus

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applescript

I want to update Preview.app in the background from the command line without losing focus of my current window. I know that I can use the following to open/update the view of a file, but then I lose focus to the Preview.app.

open -a Preview foo.pdf

I guess there might be some clever AppleScript commands to do so but so far I didn't find the right one.

Alternatively I would be interested into transfering the focus back to my current application directly after the update. I need this in order to update Preview.app's view of a PDF file through a vi autocmd after I update the PDF file according to changes in a TeX file I am editing. Here is an example of what I want to achieve but using Ubuntu and evince.

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