Learning AppleScript for Beginners » alias

Deriving Alias and POSIX Paths

admin — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:18:55 +0000

When deriving POSIX or alias paths, it is important to note that folder paths end in a punctuation character: ‘/’ for POSIX, and ‘:’ for aliases. Also, in both cases, when deriving the path to a specific document, there is no punctuation at the end.

This info can be very useful in batch processing in [...]

Using Aliases and POSIX Paths

admin — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:18:53 +0000

Over the time that I have been writing AppleScripts, I have found that one of the most difficult, if not frustrating, tasks of writing scripts is referencing files by path so that they can be accessed by other applications.

As you’ll see below, creating a reference that is understandable by the Finder is fairly [...]

Using Info Window Data to Write Scripts

admin — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 21:33:43 +0000

In the initial section of this post, I leave the AppleScript code formatted as it would appear in the Script Editor pane to show that keywords, statements and other expressions that appear in blue in the Script Editor are part of the AppleScript language and syntax and knowing that is helpful when writing scripts.

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Choose File Dialogs

admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:23:56 +0000

In this post, we continue with the ‘choose file’ command. Like the ‘choose folder’ command, it returns a reference pointer to the actual file that it represents. In this case, it returns an alias reference to a document such as:

set theFile to choose file with prompt "Select a file to open:"

With the following [...]

Choose Folder Dialogs

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:27:56 +0000

In the next few posts, we will look at dialogs where the user chooses among items in directories on the desktop that return reference pointers to the actual files (most are aliases) that they represent. The dialogs we will deal with here are ‘choose folder’, ‘choose file’, ‘choose file name’ and ‘choose color’.

First, a [...]

The Finder’s Standard Suite

admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:01:59 +0000

In my last post, we took a look at how to use the Finder’s print command, which is part of the Standard Suite. As promised, in this post we will now look at the remaining commands that make up the Standard Suite, namely: open,quit and activate.

While the last two are pretty simple to [...]

AppleScript for Creating a New Document with AppleWorks 6

admin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:49:42 +0000

Simple script to create a new AppleWorks document followed by a more detailed script with text entry fields.

If you use AppleWorks 6, you may find this script useful in creating new documents. It should be fairly easy to see how this can be adapted to your specific needs. There is a similar script for [...]