Symbolic Links in the GUI via AppleScript, PLUS
Members of the MacOSXHints community have commented and provided some improvements to my original code and the editor of MacOSXHints.com, Rob Griffiths, has posted a brief webography of related scripts and utilities in the editor’s comments of my hint submission.
First, a much improved version written by jonn8n which has (drag and drop) batch functionality. As before, paste into a new AppleScript Editor window and save it as an application, with or without startup screen.
on run
open {choose file with prompt "Choose a file to create a symbolic link:" without invisibles}
end run
on open the_files
repeat with i from 1 to (count the_files)
try
set posixpath to POSIX path of (item i of the_files)
if posixpath ends with "/" then set posixpath to text 1 thru -2 of posixpath
do shell script "ln -s " & quoted form of posixpath & " " & quoted form of (posixpath & ".sym")
end try
end repeat
end open
I think jonn8n’s version is different enough to warrant a new name. That is, I don’t consider it to be my program, and I decided to name my local copy “symbolic.app”.
Second, apparently an oldie-but-not-quite-forgotten (2002!) shell script to convert aliases to symlinks replaces command line-troublesome aliases with symbolic links.1
#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Usage: alias2ln alias1 alias2 alias3..."
echo " where alias1, alias2, etc are alias files."
echo " Each alias file will be converted into a symlink."
fi
while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
if [ -f "$1" -a ! -L "$1" ]; then
item_name=`basename "$1"`
item_parent=`dirname "$1"`
item_parent="`cd \"${item_parent}\" 2>/dev/null && pwd || echo \"${item_parent}\"`"
item_path="${item_parent}/${item_name}"
linksource=`osascript<<EOS
tell app "Finder"
set theItem to (POSIX file "${item_path}") as alias
if the kind of theItem is "alias" then
get the posix path of (original item of theItem as text)
end if
end tell
EOS`
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
if [ ! -z "$linksource" ]; then
ln -fs "${linksource}" "${item_path}"
echo "\"${1}\" -> \"${linksource}\""
fi
fi
shift
fi
done
Paste that code 2 into a text editor and save it as (I did) “alias2sym”. Make the script executable using, for example, “chmod 755 alias2sym”. Put the code somewhere in your $PATH, perhaps (as I did, and if you have administrator privileges) /usr/local/bin/.3
Finally, In an update to my last post regarding this topic, I provided a link to a hint which explains how to add system alias navigability to the command line. That hint requires the presence of Apple’s Developer Tools. Before embarking on adding such functionality, n00bs should be aware that in Mac OS 10.4.8 the bash function “cd” should be articulated in “.bash_profile” as its presence in “.bashrc” does nothing.
That is all. 