MacOS – ‘pgrep -c’ in MacOS terminal

How about if you setup your preferences to use a photo from a folder. Then your script can just drop the picture into that folder and the system will pick it up.

If you set your preferences to switch every 5 seconds, then you can change out that image whenever you script wants, and it'll be picked up within 5 seconds.

Just did a quick test moving images in and out and it works.

When running into troubles with shell quoting, it always help to add echo statements in suitable places in your script to see what's going on.

Let's look at this line by line:

for f in /Volumes/Server\ RAID/Photos;

This only runs once, and sets f to Volumes/Server RAID/Photos, which probably isn't what you want.

do ln -s /Volumes/Server\ RAID/Photos/"$f"/Final

f is set to the full path (see above), so this expands to

ln -s /Volumes/Server\ RAID/Photos//Volumes/Server\ RAID/Photos/Final

which (again) is not what you want to see here.

mv Final $f

See above :-)

There are various ways to tackle this, but in your case I would to something like the following (to get around the challenge of having to extract the directory name from the source path)

cd /Volumes/Server\ RAID/Photos/
for f in *; do
    if [ -d "$f" ]; then 
        if [ -d "$f"/Final ]; then
            ln -s "/Volumes/Server RAID/Photos/$f/Final" ~/Desktop/"$f"
        fi
    fi
done

The two ifs cover the cases where there are files in the source directory or the Final directory is missing.