Copying files to the clipboard using applescript

applescriptcommand linecopy/paste

Often I find myself at the command line wanting to copy files to the clipboard, so that I can paste them as attachments in Mail. If I have an image file, image1.png, I can accomplish this with

osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to set the clipboard to ( POSIX file "image1.png" )'

If I execute the above command and then open a new message in Mail and press command V, the image file is pasted as an attachment. Note that pbcopy is apparently not a solution here, because this would copy the contents of the file and result in junk when pasted with command V.

My question is how can I do the same thing with multiple files? Suppose I want to paste both image1.png and image2.png. This is trivial from Finder (select them both, command C, then switch to Mail and command V; voila, both files show up as attachments)… but how can I do this from the command line?

Best Answer

This isn't quite perfect for what you want, but I think it might get you closer. Quicksilver has a command line tool. When installed, you can pipe files from the command line to Quicksilver app, and from there send them as attachments in Mail.

To install Quicksilver command line tool, activate Quicksilver. Then navigate to Quicksilver > Preferences to open preferences window. Click on Preferences on top right of window. On the left, click on Command Line Tool and install.

In Terminal, you'll be able to type

qs path/to/file1 path/to/file2 path/to/file3 path/to/file4

Pressing enter will send those files to Quicksilver's first pane. Press tab to move to the action pane and choose the Mail/New Email With Attachment action. Press enter, and a new email with your selected files attached should appear.

Note that you will also have to install the Mail and Command Line plugins in Quicksilver (Quicksilver > Preferences > Plug Ins).

Related Solutions

MacOS – Copy and Paste files into the same directory using Terminal

So, does it matter if the file is the same file?

ie: Let say there is a picture google.png

Google logo

and you want it to copied into the same dir 4 times.

as an in that directory you would have google.png google 2.png google 3.png google 4.png?

If thats what you want:

for i in {1..4}
  do
     cp google.png "google$i.png"
  done

But if you want the "images" files to be different, and they are going to be gibrish files, but 10m in size exactly

you wanna do something like

for i in {1..5}
   do
      dd if=/dev/random of="yourfilename$i.test" bs=12428800 count=1
   done

This will make four files that are 10m in size filled with bunch of random characters.

Comment and let me know what you really want and I can go back and redo this.

It would help if you posted your script that fails so I can see what youre trying to do.

EDIT:

Changed the in device from /dev/zero to /dev/random to generate random file content.

MacOS – AppleScript and Finder – How to detect an “empty” selection when copying paths to the clipboard (Expanded Question)

I think = is what you're looking for.

set sel to (get selection)
if not sel = {} then
    --stuff is selected
else
    --no stuff is selected
end if

Or remove the not and flip the cases

set sel to (get selection)
if sel = {} then
    --no stuff is selected
else
    --stuff is selected
end if

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Copy and Paste files into the same directory using Terminal

MacOS – AppleScript and Finder – How to detect an “empty” selection when copying paths to the clipboard (Expanded Question)

Related Question