One thing that is not easy from the Mac finder is making a new file. I realize this is a very Unix / Windows way of thinking, to find a place in the filesystem then decide “hey, I need a file here!” instead of making the document and saving it, but it’s the way my mind works when I’m adding one document to a large collection. What I usually do is copy a file in the collection and modify that, but that doesn’t update the file creation date. Grr!
There are apparently a few solutions to this on Mac OS X, but I couldn’t find any that were open source (well, other than doing it in the shell and using touch) so naturally, I wrote my own today. Here it is!
After reading this I realized I could make a Mac Service with Automator. An hour of head-to-desk action later, and we have this:
from this!
The code in text:
$file = "";
while () {
print $_;
$file = $_;
}
chomp($file);
$file =~ s/"/\\"/g;
$dir = "";
if (-d $file) {
$dir = $file;
} else {
$dir = `dirname "$file"`;
chomp ($dir);
$dir =~ s/"/\\"/g;
}
`touch "$dir/newfile.txt"`;
#print "$file -- $dir";
If you want it, you can download it from my site.
Lemme know what you think!
Hey … thanks for sharing this.
Any change you can make this work without the need to select a folder … that is, directly by right clicking on the desktop (like in windows)?