I wrote a quick bash script that lets me start or stop a local instance of tomcat with a single click. If you ONLY intend to ever run one tomcat at a time this will work pretty well.

It uses catalina.sh instead of startup.sh, and sets the CATALINA_PID variable to write a file containing the pid of the launched tomcat.

It first checks to see if there is a pid file at the location set by CATALINA_PID. If there is, the script reads the file and, making the assumption that you want to stop the running tomcat, calls 'catalina.sh stop', waits a few seconds and checks for the pid file again. If the file still exists it runs kill -9 on the pid, hopefully *really* stopping tomcat.

If there is no pid file we assume that tomcat is not running, and run the launch command. In my case I set the java version first, then provide a path for the PID variable, then run 'catalina.sh start'

More details in the code comments.

UPDATED FOR MAC OS: added OS X-specific alerts.

Script attached