Andy Chase

In my ongoing attempt to perfect my iPhoto to Movable Type solution, I ran into the need to convert a Unix path (/tmp/foo.jpg) into an HFS style path (Mac HD:tmp:foo.jpg) that plays nicely with AppleScript's 'read' command.

Apparently this isn't all that common an issue, since file paths tend to be grabbed programmatically by AppleScript... but because I'm doing stuff with shell commands I'm working with Unix paths.

After much Googling, I found my answer in the first comment of a post on macosxhints.com.

In a nutshell, to convert a string representing a Unix file path into an HFS file path, do like so:

posix file "/path/to/my/file.txt"

This is probably not news to anybody who actually knows AppleScript, but I'm still stumbling my way along, grabbing other people's code and making educated guesses. The plain English style syntax is disconcerting.