I installed emacs on my MacBook Air running Mac OS X 10.6.5 from this site http://emacsformacosx.com/. I believe this is what used to be called cocoa emacs. I dragged it into my Application folder and it works fine when I run it from there. I want to be able to run it from the Terminal. After some googling, I tried open -a /Application/Emacs.app foo.txt (foo.txt was and existing file). I got two emacs windows - one with welcome screen and one with foo.txt loaded. I tried a few applications in the /Applications directory and they did not seem to behave like this. I had installed it using my own account (an admin account) so after doing ls -l on /Application I noticed that the owner and group were different from the other entries in this folder. I recursively changed the owner and group to root and wheel, like the others, but this did not help. The only thing that looks funny now is that there that ls -l show a @ character which has something to do with extended attributes but I don't know how to check these.

Any suggestions on what to check next?

Is using the open command the only to run the program? Can I simulate what it does using a shell script?