[moonmonkey]

Does anyone know how to access the finders "find..." command from within Applescript.
GUI scripting is not really an option.

Thanks.

[JNI]

Originally posted by moonmonkey:
Does anyone know how to access the finders "find..." command from within Applescript.
GUI scripting is not really an option.

Thanks.

I don't think the Find feature of the Finder is scriptable. I don't see it anywhere in the Finder dictionary.

I think your best bet would be to call through to the BSD subsystem 'find' command using the 'do shell script' feature of AppleScript. See 'man find' from a terminal. It's a bit difficult to harness its power, but if you post a an example of what you want to do, someone could probably help in hooking that up.

You could also hand-roll a way to search the filesystem using pure AppleScript, but it will probably be like thousands of times slower than using BSD find, and it would be probably dozens if not hundreds of lines of AppleScript code. Wrapping BSD find in AS will still probably be a dozen or so lines in AS, depending on what kind of options you want to expose to the user.

[moonmonkey]

Originally posted by JNI:
but if you post a an example of what you want to do, someone could probably help in hooking that up.

I want a script which displays a window with files who's modification date is today.
i'm stumped.

[JNI]

Originally posted by moonmonkey:
I want a script which displays a window with files who's modification date is today.
i'm stumped.

I looked a bit into this and found that because the UI capabilities of a simple AppleScript are so limited, it becomes a problem if you want to show a list of more than a few entries. It would probably be better to use AppleScript Studio so that you could have a scrolling text box or a table or something to display the results. But I don't see why you would want to do that, since if you just run the find command from the terminal, that's already what it will do. Unless you then wanted to interact with the list or something, then you might want to add more UI like a sortable list, or buttons to invoke actions on the elements or something like that.

The basics of what you would do if you want to pursue an AS solution would be to construct the arguments to the find command and call 'do shell script' with the constructed command. Then you would need to take the returned esults and decide how you want to display them. As I said, in a simple AppleScript, your UI options are limited. You could put it into a list using the 'choose from list' command, but that's about it, and not a very pleasing solution.

If you see 'man find' there is an example of how to find recently modified files.