Applescript/Unix

idunnoidunno
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Which one would you advise I learn first? (When I say learn, I mean buy a book about, casually read it, and then never actually use it until someone says "Hey, does anyone know how to do blah blah blah in Unix?" and I'll think "Hmmm, I think I remember reading that." And then not being able to help them)



Les.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 1
    neutrino23neutrino23 Posts: 1,562member
    The two don't overlap at all. Unix is a much, much larger topic. It covers anything you might do to manage your computer and network but using an in-line text interface rather than a mouse driven GUI.



    Applescript is a way to manage your applications including the Finder. With Applescript you tell other applications to do things, sometimes with arguments that you pass them through the script. Pretty much anything you can do by hand can be done with a script if the application supports scripting.



    Some of my scripts:



    Extremely simple: Tell iTunes to start playing a certain playlist. This can be called by iCal as an alarm making a simple alarm clock.



    Simple: Insert the current day and date in a format I like into my Tex-Edit Plus file that I use as a diary.



    Moderately complex



    Download the html of Macsurfer.com, extract all the news entries, sort them by time, write the result to the disk and open in Safari.



    Fairly complex



    An AppleScript Studio application for quickly moving selected text from emails to files on disk. Inside one main folder are folders named for agents I deal with. Inside each agent folder are client folders. Client folder hold almost anything including a history file. With two popup menus and three radio buttons I can quickly perform a desired function on a specific client folder. For example, as I scan through emails I can select paragraphs important to certain topics then choose the radio button for adding to history then choose the agent and the client. This will automatically find that history file, open it and append the selected text. If the file doesn't exist it creates one.



    I could have done this all by hand (select the text, search through the folders to the one I want, open the history file, etc. It just goes a lot more quickly and accurately with the script.



    My suggestion is to learn a little about scripting. Look at the www.applescript.com, I think they have a tutorial. Of course, I am not unbiased.
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