MacOS, Finder – Obtain the Path of a Directory or File as String

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://

on handle_url(args)
    set theUnixPath to |URL_PATH| of args
    set theUnixPath to (POSIX path of (path to home folder)) & "Google Drive" & theUnixPath
    set theMacPath to (POSIX file theUnixPath)

    #display dialog "handle url: " & theMacPath 

    tell application "Finder"
        set theItem to item theMacPath
        if (class of theItem) is folder then activate
        reveal theItem
    end tell
    activate application "Finder"

    return 1
end handle_url

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

find is rather literal. When you tell it to search within "~/Downloads/", it uses that (including the trailing slash) as the prefix for whatever it finds. Since there's an unnecessary and irrelevant slash at the end of the path you gave it, you wind up with an unnecessary and irrelevant extra slash in the output.

Solution: remove the trailing "/" from the search directory:

#> find ~/Downloads/ -iregex ".*some.*"
/Users/michael/Downloads//subDirectory/some_file.pdf
#> find ~/Downloads -iregex ".*some.*"
/Users/michael/Downloads/subDirectory/some_file.pdf