Maya's Command Line Tools

Maya ships with a number of command line tools.  These tools are installed by default and live within Maya's "application bundle."  If you open the Terminal application (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and change directories to Maya's install location, then you can list the contents of the bin directory as follows:

ls Maya.app/Contents/bin

It is recommended that you add this directory to your PATH environment variable in your shell.

The "maya" command can be used to interact with Maya from the shell.  The following will start up and interactive Maya session in your shell.

Maya.app/Contents/bin/maya -prompt

Note that the "maya" shell command will try to locate Maya.app in the following ways:
1. Using the MAYA_LOCATION environment variable
2. Using a relative path from the "maya" executable (../../../Maya.app)
3. Using Launch Services.  This will find Maya wherever it is installed