What does "Finder could not get folder..." mean?
What does "Finder could not get folder..." mean?
- Subject: What does "Finder could not get folder..." mean?
- From: Chris Page <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2001 04:47:23 -0700
What does "Finder could not get folder..." mean? More to the point, what
does it mean when the "get" is given a reference to a folder that was
returned to me by the Finder in the first place. And why does this error
seem to magically disappear if I mess around with the script enough, and
then magically start happening again later?
Here's roughly what I'm doing:
-- f = folder "Contents" of package "Foo.app" of ...
tell application "Finder"
set lockedFiles to every item of f whose locked is true
if the length of lockedFiles is greater than 0 then
set pathList to ""
repeat with l in lockedFiles
set pathList to pathList & (" '" & l & "'")
end repeat
tell application "MPW Shell"
activate
DoScript "SetFile -a l" & pathList
end tell
end if
end tell
In my real script, f is an argument that comes from somewhere else, and was
generated by telling the Finder to get "the contents of" a folder. This is
part of a recursive operation that attempts to unlock all the locked files
in a folder by getting a path string for each item and passing it to MPW
Shell to unlock with "SetFile".
[I have to do this myself for two reasons: (1) "entire contents" doesn't
work inside packages; the Finder just hangs, and (2) "set the locked of x to
false" doesn't work inside packages, either; the Finder produces an error
(what's up with that?). Even if I use "entire contents" on the folder before
it becomes a package it is flaky and doesn't actually catch all the items
that need to be unlocked, perhaps because the folder contains a lot of items
*shrug*.]
I tried using "items" vs. "files" and adding "contents of" to remove
indirection in various places, and explicitly using "get l as alias" and
"get l as text" and if I try these changes enough times, the script will
start working. But later it mysteriously starts producing these "Finder
could not get..." errors again, with no changes to the script (I'm pretty
sure). It makes me think there's a bug in AppleScript, or it's hitting a
memory limitation, or I'm just missing some fine detail that only
accidentally lets this work sometimes.
I also thought this just might be one more thing that doesn't work inside
packages, but when I had it in the state where the error was occurring, I
changed f to refer to the container of the package, so it wasn't trying to
do anything inside the package, and the error continued to happen.
--
Chris Page
Mac OS Lead, Palm Desktop
Palm, Inc.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that
one9s work is a giant talking wheel of cheese. - Bertell Russrand