AppleScript in a Nutshell

Finding and Deleting Only Certain File Types

Microsoft Word creates a lot of extra files on your hard disk when you are working on a word-processing document. Sometimes Word never disposes of these files (say, if the computer happens to crash). The following script helps trash these leftover files to make sure that your disk is not cluttered up with them. The next example will delete any file in a folder the user chooses that has the following characteristics:

• The filename contains “Word Work File.”

• The file type is “PDBN.”

• The creator type is “MSWD.”

The creator type and file type were exposed for these files by using the script in the previous example. The script in Example 14-2 first uses the choose folder scripting addition to get the user to select a folder. It then calls the list folder osax to get a list of the contents of the selected folder (this list is stored in the flist variable). Appendix A, covers the scripting additions (otherwise known as osax, or osaxen in plural form). With each of the folder’s files, the script finds out whether its name contains “Word Work File” and whether it has a creator type of “MSWD” and file type of “PDBN.” These are the only kinds of files we want to delete. The Finder’s delete command puts these files in the trash. We keep track of how many files got deleted and display this number to the user. I call this script in Example 14-2 unceremoniously “TrashWord.”

Example 14-2. The TrashWord Script

set fol to choose folder set counter to 0 tell ...