How to prevent PDFBox application menu (on OS X)

Question

When I run java -jar pdfbox-app-1.8.8.jar ExtractText foo.pdf foo.txt on OS X, it grabs focus away from the current application, puts a "PDFBox" menu on the menubar, and brings the invisible PDFBox application to the foreground. Then the app disappears a second later when the text extraction is finished. This is really annoying (e.g. when I'm running a batch of extractions in the background). How can I run the pdfbox jar file without it creating an application menu / grabbing focus?

Answer 1

Setting the Djava.awt.headless option to true should prevent that:

java -Djava.awt.headless=true -jar pdfbox-app-1.8.8.jar ExtractText foo.pdf foo.txt

And then to run the java process itself in the background, append " &" to the whole command:

java -Djava.awt.headless=true -jar pdfbox-app-1.8.8.jar ExtractText foo.pdf foo.txt &