I often download files, may it be from the web or from my e-mail program of choice (at work: sadly Outlook, at home Mail) and need to do stuff with it in the console.

To speed up this process, I’ve written this small AppleScript. The ideas far outpace my abilities with AppleScript, so for now it only works in Finder (although it has stuff in it to prepare it to work universally, it currently doesn’t). I thought I’d share it anyway, so here it comes:

{% highlight applescript %}
— get active window
tell application “System Events”
— get the name of the frontmost application
set theApp to (name of the first process whose frontmost is true) as text
end tell

— debug
–tell application “Finder” to display dialog theApp

tell application theApp
— check if we have documents or, basically, Finder
set documentCount to count documents
— if we have documents, select the currently open one
if documentCount > 0 then
— fetch the document name
set theDocument to document 1
set theFile to path of theDocument
— chop the file name to cd to the directory
set tid to AppleScript’s text item delimiters
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to “/”
set chunks to text items of theFile
if last item of chunks is “” then set chunks to reverse of (rest of (reverse of chunks))
set theFilePath to quoted form of (reverse of (rest of (reverse of chunks)) as text)
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to tid
else
using terms from application “Finder”
— no documents open. Here comes Finder …
set theFilePath to POSIX path of (target of window 1 as alias)
end using terms from
end if
end tell

— Now open in iTerm2
tell application “iTerm”
activate
set theTerm to (make new terminal)
tell theTerm
— set size
set number of columns to 132
set number of rows to 50
— launch a default shell in a new tab in the same terminal
launch session “Default Session”
tell the last session
— cd to the directory
write text “cd ” & theFilePath
end tell
end tell
end tell
{% endhighlight %}