macaliaser

macaliaser - script to create aliases for applications on OSX / MacOS

FEATURES

generation of aliases MacOS applications for shell use
black listing og applications for alias generation

SYNOPSIS

# Generate aliases in /Applications directory
$ macaliaser -i /Applications

# Generate aliases in /Applications directory and Applications directory in users home directory
$ macaliaser -i /Applications $HOME/Applications

# help message
$ macaliaser -h

# Serialize the generated aliases to a file in you home directory
$ macaliaser -i /Applications > ~/.aliases

DESCRIPTION

This script create aliases from all the applications in the directories you scan.

The recommended usage is to put the aliases in a separate file and use the from you preferred shell.

I have the following line in my .bash_profile

source "$HOME/.aliases"

So the script can proces the file with out conflicting with other bash settings, apart from the .bash_profile change, I have added the following line to my crontab

0 12 * * 1 $HOME/bin/macaliaser -i /Applications/ \
$HOME/Applications/ > $HOME/.aliases

Do note that cron is not necessarily running under the same shell as the user so in order to get a proper path set for useful alias suggestions, you might have to tweak the environment and emulate a user shell session, like so:

0 12 * * 1 . $HOME/.bash_profile; $HOME/bin/macaliaser -i /Applications/ \
$HOME/Applications/ > $HOME/.aliases

This sources the shell (bash in this case) resource file prior to execution. See Stack Overflow

Black Listing

You can enable black listing of applications by adding a file named: blacklist to $HOME/.config/macaliaser/blacklist like this example:

/Users/jonasbn/Applications/Chrome Apps.localized/Default \
pjkljhegncpnkpknbcohdijeoejaedia.app

Do note that the spaces are not escaped.

OPTIONS

-i (index)

This indexes the directories listed after -- or provided as arguments to -i
-v (verbosity)

This outputs informative messages to STDERR so you can filter it from the generated data, which is printed to STDOUT

FUNCTIONS

is_app

This checks whether a file has a name in the format:

«name».app

Do note that names can contain spaces and this is handled.

If this is true it processes the entry further SEE suggest.

suggest

suggest suggest different aliases for your applications, each suggestion is tested for existance by is_cmd, which relies on File::Which, so we do not overrule any existing commands (like mail).

The tries are done in the following order:

lowercase, name without .app extension, example: imovie
lowercase, name with .app extension, example: mailapp
uppercased first letter with .app extension
the original name

cmd_exist

cmd_exists check whether there already is a command with the suggested alias in path.

This uses File::Which’s which subroutine, which works like the shell command <which>

create_alias

create_alias is used to create the actual alias, based on the suggestions from suggest.

Alias are actually just strings in the form of:

alias somealias="open -a /some/path/to/an/app"

REFERENCES

ISSUE REPORTING

AUTHOR

jonasbn jonasbn@cpan.org

DEVELOPMENT

If you want to contribute to macaliaser please read the Contribution guidelines and follow the pull request guidelines.

COPYRIGHT

LICENSE

macaliaser is free software and is released under the Artistic License 2.0.