Re: Find All (Scriptable) Applications
Re: Find All (Scriptable) Applications
- Subject: Re: Find All (Scriptable) Applications
- From: Sun Real <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 11:21:09 +1000
Rob Jorgensen's message of 4/7/01 10:08 PM contained:
>
Howdy :-)
G'day Rob,
>
I'm looking for a script/routine which will "quickly" locate all
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currently installed applications on the script's host computer. I
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ultimately want to narrow the list down to scriptable applications,
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but this shouldn't be too difficult once the applications are found.
Don't know about quickly, but the Finder can directly get a list of
scriptable apps:
tell application "Finder"
set myASAppList to (name of every application file) of entire contents
of startup disk whose (has scripting terminology) is true
end tell
>
In trying to avoid a recursive routine which looks at every file, I
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had considered an attempt to parse the desktop files, but, after
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making copies of and viewing these files, I doubt that this is
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feasible. Does Mac OS maintain a registry of installed applications?
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If so, is it easily accessed and/or parsed?
AFAIK that's the desktop DB/DF & I guess you could read them if you
really wanted to, though it may require a little study of some of the
Inside Macintosh books first. I don't know.
>
Does anyone have suggestions on how to tackle this in a manner that
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wouldn't dramatically bog down on some of today's high capacity hard
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drives?
The above line took a couple of seconds on a 3gig partition in a G4/400 &
returned 33 items. The desktop DF on this volume is not exactly small
either, so I wouldn't expect any text parsing routine written in AS is
going to be all that fast in any case. Perl maybe...
>
Thanks for any input you might offer.
Cheers,
Richard Morton
-- Great Lies of the Music Business: "We really want you in the band"