launch for Mac OS X

I’m in the habit of keeping multiple profiles under firefox. It means I can have a profile for FF2 (with old plugins that haven’t been ported to FF3), a profile for development with FF3, and one for general browsing with FF3.

Despite their usefulness, profiles seem to be discouraged. The profile manager isn’t shown by default. You have to start the firefox binary with -P to get it up.

Having multiple profiles is great, but under Mac OS X it’s not easy to use them simultaneously. Trying to re-launch an application just activates the currently open instance. Aside from the (wasteful) hack of duplicating the .app directory, how do you open the same application twice under Mac OS X?

The answer is launch. It’s in fink too.

launch -m -a Firefox

Apparently Quicksilver had a “Launch a copy” action that did something similar, but I can’t find it in the current version.