Problem with importing text files via applescript

I’ve just downloaded EagleFiler and have been playing around a bit with CLI imports using applescript. I’m sure that this is a problem with my understanding of how the mac os encodes file meta data. Anyway, her goes.

I tried this:
created testimport.as in emacs based on the example in the manual:
tell application “EagleFiler”
tell library document 1
import files {POSIX file “/Users/souheil/testimport.as”}
end tell
end tell

Executed the script from the command line:
osascript testimport.as
This should import the script as a text file. Unfortunately, I get the “Unsupported File Type” error.

Here’s where I’ve gotten to in my debugging process:

  1. the file command returns:
    testimport.as.txt: ASCII Java program text
  2. the finder has no idea what the file type is
  3. if I make the extension .txt everything works as expected and the import goes smoothly
  4. The GUI does the same thing as the applescript. I suppose I should say that the applescript does the same thing as the GUI :slight_smile:

I have a lot of test files with funny extensions, like .tex, .cls, .sty, .m, .c, .h, etc. (you guessed it, I’m a science geek), and I would like to import them into EagleFiler. Appending .txt to all the filename breaks a lot of other stuff. What should I do?

Thanks,
Souheil

At present, EagleFiler identifies text files by:

  • Checking if the extension is one that the OS knows goes with text files. I think the OS knows about .h, .m, and .c files. It probably doesn’t know about the TeX types unless you have an application installed that declares those types as text.
  • Checking if the HFS file type is one that the OS knows goes with text files.
  • Checking if the file starts with a byte order mark (BOM).

My guess is that TeX wouldn’t like it if you added BOMs to its files. I think the best bet, with EagleFiler 1.0.2, would be to set the types of the files to ‘TEXT’ so that EagleFiler and the OS know they’re text. Going forward, I plan to make EagleFiler recognize more extensions and do more sniffing of file contents to identify text files.

Okay that makes sense.

A few more questions:

  • how do I set the type of the file to ‘TEXT’?
  • is this an HFS+ only feature or will it work on NFS filesystems as well?

There are various file utilities like Super Get Info, XRay, and File Buddy. There’s the SetFile command that comes with the developer tools. Or you could save this AppleScript:


on open theFiles
    tell application "Finder"
        repeat with theFile in theFiles
            set file type of theFile to "TEXT"
        end repeat
    end tell
end open

as an application and use it as a droplet. File types are only natively stored on HFS, but OS X will emulate them on other file systems.

EagleFiler 1.1 will look at the contents of files to try to recognize them as text, even if they don’t have a known extension or HFS file type.