MacOS – specify file associations at a more general or specific level

file extensionsmacos

Can I set Mavericks to do things like:

Open password-protected PDFs in a particular app (Skim), and other PDFs in another app, like Chrome or Preview?
Open all videos in VLC? Currently I have to do this again and again for each extension, like mov, m4v, avi, etc. When I double-click a video file, it's anybody's guess what app it opens in, depending on what the extension happens to be. Can I tell OS X to open all videos in VLC?
Building on (2), can I ask OS X to open all files that VLC can open, in VLC? This goes for both audio and video files.

Best Answer

I'm not certain about separating out password-protected PDFs specifically - it would depend on how they differentiated themselves to the OS, but everything else can be done with RCDefaultApp which, though quite old, is still perfectly functional.
It adds itself as a control panel & can then adjust defaults for any app & protocol.

Related Solutions

MacOS – Icon associated with extension

See this detailed answer for "How to set an icon for a file type on Mac?" on superuser.com.

In this case, you need to update TextEdit's resources and plist to get it to use your custom icon for a file type it does not know about. The LaunchServices database also needs to be updated for the changes to be seen.

Here's a small snippet from that answer (bold emphasis mine):

Icons for file types are handled by Launch Services (the service determining, among other things, which application handles a file type). The file icon is always provided by the application handling opening a file by default. This way, e.g. Preview provides PDF icons by default, and PNG icons, but if you change all PNG files to open using Pixelmator instead, these files get a Pixelmator-style icon afterwards.

What you need to do is add your file type definition to the application that opens it by default, or create your own "dummy" application for the file type.

Have Automator parse down folders and list all filenames without their extension

Automator and Scripting Approach

The Automator Actions you want are:

Ask for Finder Items, with Type set to Folders.
Run Shell Script, with Shell set to /usr/bin/perl.
New Text File

For the shell script, copy and paste in:

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Basename;
use File::Find;

find(sub {
    return if (-d $File::Find::name);
    my($filename,undef,undef) = fileparse($_,qr/\.[^.]*/);
    print $filename."\n";
}, shift);

Automator list files

You can use the New TextEdit Document action if you want the resulting file list to appear in TextEdit but not saved to disk.

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To learn more about using Automator, see Apple's Mac Basics: Automator.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Icon associated with extension

Have Automator parse down folders and list all filenames without their extension

Automator and Scripting Approach

Related Question