Where have my scripts gone?

TidBITS Talk
1

Am I being thick? I don’t use scripts very often, but there was one I used to find really helpful. Using it you could easily remove or add characters to filenames. When I looked under the script icon recently to perform this action I discovered that there are very few scripts there any more (I upgraded to Mojave a couple of months ago). There used to be dozens, in various different categories.

Where have they all gone? I don’t remember ever installing them. I thought they came with the OS. Has Mojave abandoned them? There are a few still, in folders called ColorSync, Folder Actions, Font Book, Printing Scripts, Script Editor Scripts, UI Element Scripts, and VoiceOver. But none for doing stuff in Finder, like changing file names.

Is there any way of reinstalling them? The usual Google search isn’t proving too helpful.

Thanks in advance

2

I’ve found over the years that many of those older scripts no longer work with the then current OS and wondered why Apple kept them around. Apparently somebody decided it was time to clean house.

3

G’day Kevan

To add to/remove from/replace file names there’s a couple of options:

  1. In a Finder window select the items you want to change.
  2. Top centre of the finder window there’s a cog with a drop down arrow (if you hover over it it’ll come up with Perform tasks with selected items
  3. Click on the cog and a drop down menu appears
  4. About half way down you’ll see Rename x items
  5. Click on that and you get the option to Replace, Add or Format the file names

For more complex batch changes to file names you could try Applications > Automator.

Cheers, Gobit

4

NameMangler is jolly useful, really flexible (particularly if you are familiar with regular expressions) and inexpensive.

Jeremy

5

I wondered. Shame Apple didn’t replace them with scripts that did work.

Thanks for the reply
Kevan

6

Thanks for the reply Gobit.

Yes, I had in fact discovered the rename task (by right-clicking on the file selection) and it could be of some use. Unfortunately it will strip names of a character string wherever it occurs, not just at the start, so wasn’t quite what I was looking for.

Cheers anyway
Kevan

7

Great, thanks Jeremy.

That looks like a good bet, at a reasonable price. I’ll give it a whirl.

Best
Kevan