This is the background:
in my company, we use Google Drive and often have to tell each other the path to a particular file. Paths are long as we use a lot of nested folders, so it's pretty boring and time consuming to browse through all that.
Now, in my previous company, we used a central afp server, so the path was common to everyone, therefore I had created an applescript script that could get the absolute afp path to the file, people pasted that path in a mail or chat and the end user could click on that path which automatically became a link and the finder would open, selecting that particular file or folder that the link led to.
The reason I can't use the exact same script is that Google Drive folder is in the user home folder. So if user's name is Foo the path will be file:///Users/Foo/Google Drive
, while for user Bar the path will be file:///Users/Bar/Google Drive
Clearly the path generated from user Foo won't work for user Bar
Since, at least in the terminal, the path to file:///Users/username
equals to ~
, I made my script generate links like file:///~/Google Drive/pathToFolder
, but they do not work 🙁 Clicking on such a link will open the finder, but won't select the right file or folder
This is driving me crazy because it looks like it should work but it simply doesn't… is there any other syntax I should try? Any suggestion?
Thanks in advance!
Best Answer
Here is the solution. The script that generates the link, generats a url that starts with a custom
googledrive://
and then the path to the file in the Google Drive folder.I then set lincastor to trigger the following script for urls beginning with
googledrive://
The script is super easy, it takes the url, attaches the path to the user homes folder and
/Google Drive/
, then uses this generated path to open the Finder and reveal the item