Launching Squirrel SQL client on Mac OS

I ran into similar issue and the following change fixed the issue. Open the Application Folder in finder and open the App Package Contents and navigate to Contents/MacOS/. Open the squirrel-sql.sh file and update the value of "SQUIRREL_SQL_HOME" around line 56.

Out of box, the value would be

SQUIRREL_SQL_HOME=`dirname "$0"`/Contents/Resources/Java

Update this to

SQUIRREL_SQL_HOME='/Applications/SQuirreLSQL.app/Contents/Resources/Java'

Thanks to https://sourceforge.net/p/squirrel-sql/bugs/1232/#6bc6


The shell script now comes with Alternative solutions ready. Alternative 2 works for me. Just commented out Alternative 1 and uncommented the 2.

#Alternative 1
#SQUIRREL_SQL_HOME=`dirname "$0"`/Contents/Resources/Java

#Alternative 2
SQUIRREL_SQL_HOME=$(echo $ABSPATH | grep -o '^/.*/Contents/')Resources/Java

#Alternative 3
#SQUIRREL_SQL_HOME=`/Applications/SQuirreLSQL.app/Contents/Resources/Java'

Open the script file as in @vijay answer.


  1. Open the squirrel-sql.sh file (/Applications/SQuirreLSQL.app/Contents/MacOS/squirrel-sql.sh)
  2. Follow the suggests at line 62 to choose the right 'SQUIRREL_SQL_HOME=...' line by commenting the wrong one and uncommenting the right one. Just like this:
##################################################################################################
# CHANGE_HERE
# Mac users are not able which of the three lines below works correctly, see bugs 1287, 1321, 1310.
# Thus if you have problems running SQuirreL on IOS please try out the alternative lines
##################################################################################################    
#    SQUIRREL_SQL_HOME=`dirname "$0"`/Contents/Resources/Java
     SQUIRREL_SQL_HOME=$(echo $ABSPATH | grep -o '^/.*/Contents/')Resources/Java
#    SQUIRREL_SQL_HOME=`dirname "$0"`/../Resources/Java