Create bash script to open URL in Mac OS X

automatorosx lion

I want to OS X to intelligently open git URLs by first trying to open their repo page on GitHub, and then falling back to something like GitBox.app.

I found this question extremely helpful, and I created an Automator app to wrap a bash script (which does all of the intelligent stuff), and used RCDefaultApp to set OS X to use my automator app to open git:// URLs.

This didn't work, so I tried some debugging. I set my bash script to output its arguments to /tmp/output.txt, and it turns out that the script isn't getting any command line arguments. If I set OS X to use this same automator app as the default app for *.txt files, the bash script correctly gets the path of the file as the first argument, but it doesn't work with URLs. Any idea how to get this to work?

Also, I'm running 10.7.

Edit: Here's a snapshot of the Automator app:

And here's the text of that simple bash script (not what I would actually use to open the git:// URLs, but it demonstrates the lack of arguments:

rm -f /tmp/output.txt
echo $0 >> /tmp/output.txt
echo $* >> /tmp/output.txt

And the only output I get in /tmp/output.txt is:

Best Answer

It doesn't work like that, because OS X doesn't treat files, folders, and URLs, which are just command line arguments to the associated programs on other systems, like other platforms. Automator programs really only can handle files and folders.

You need to create an AppleScript based application, which responds to open location.

Open AppleScript Editor, and paste the following code (changing the script of course):

on open location myURL
    do shell script "echo " & myURL & " > /Users/danielbeck/test"
end open location

Save as application. Then select the application bundle you just created, right-click, Show Package Contents, and edit Contents/Info.plist using a text editor (after converting to XML using plutil on the command line, if it's binary), or the default editor which is part of Apple's Developer Tools.

Add the following to its top-level structure (the screenshot is how it looks like in current Xcode, the XML is what you'd add in a text editor):

<key>CFBundleURLTypes</key>
<array>
    <dict>
        <key>CFBundleURLSchemes</key>
        <array>
            <string>openme</string>
        </array>
        <key>CFBundleURLName</key>
        <string>AppleScript Testing URL</string>
    </dict>
</array>

That will associate openme:// URLs with that application. Save, move the program to a different folder and back to update Launch Services, and test it by typing an openme:// URL into a web browser's address bar:

You'll want to replace openme by git and the echo call by your shell script, of course.

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Open Automator
Create new service
Choose to receive selected Files and Folders in Finder (note: this actually won't work too well on folders...)

Add action Run Shell Script, set Shell to /bin/bash and Pass input to "as arguments", and enter this script:

for file; do
    if [[ -d "$file" ]]; then
        echo "$(basename "$file") is a directory"
    else
        cd "$(dirname "$file")"
        /usr/bin/openssl sha1 "$(basename "$file")"
    fi
done | tr "\n" "\r"

Add action Run Applescript, and enter this script:

on run {input, parameters}
    tell application "System Events"
        activate
        display dialog input buttons {"OK"} default button 1
    end tell
end run

Save the service with a descriptive name

Create OS X Service to Pass File Path to Shell Script – How to

Select to create a Service in Automator that receives selected files and folders as input in Finder only. Add the Run Shell Script action and pass input as arguments.

The arguments you receive are the full Unix paths of the selected files and folders. Using growlnotify, part of Growl for demonstration purposes:

Growl message as a result of running it on a file:

The command appears in the context menu of a file or folder in Finder. If there are too many applicable Services, they are grouped into a submenu Services.

If your script requires both the full file path, and the file name, you can do something like the following, first extracting the file name from the full path:

for f in "$@"
do
    name="$( basename $f )"
    /usr/local/bin/growlnotify "$name" -m "$f"
done

You can see that the file name is used as title, while the path is used as message in Growl:

If you need to query for additional input, you can execute a short AppleScript to do that. The following is a complete shell script (like the growlnotify above) that queries for input, and renames the selected file to that new name. I did not include error handling and such, e.g. adding colons and slashes to the new file name will likely break the script.

    # repeat for every file in selection
for f in "$@"
do
    # capture input of a simple dialog in AppleScript
    OUT=$( osascript -e "tell application \"System Events\" to text returned of (display dialog \"New Name of $f:\" default answer \"\")" )
    # if the user canceled, skip to the next file
    [[ $? -eq 0 ]] || continue
    # old file name is the loop variable
    OLD="$f"
    # new file name is the same directory, plus the user's input
    NEW="$( dirname "$OLD" )/$OUT"
    # print a message announcing the rename
    /usr/local/bin/growlnotify "Renaming…" -m "$OLD to $NEW"
    # perform the actual rename
    mv "$OLD" "$NEW"
done

Screenshot of a sample rename action announced via growlnotify:

Best Answer

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