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lanceloz Author

Level 1

14 points

Automator quick action needs fixing

Hi,

I have been successfully using an Automator quick action on my old Macbook Pro, until I switched to a new Macbook Pro 13" M1 with BigSur. The quick actions have been imported from the old Macbook Pro to the new one through Time Machine restore.

The quick action was designed to ask on selected Finder files. It was doing three things :

1) changing their properties (chmod command) to clear the ownership,

2) changing their tag colour to green, and

3) copying them to another folder on my disk. This folder is synchronised and shared with external people through Dropbox.

Recently, Big Sur displays an error message when running this quick action. I cannot seem to figure out what to do to solve it.

Here is the error message. It says it is unable to change file mode:

And here is the quick action in Automator:

Is there a way I can fix this to work with Big Sur.

By the way, as far as i recall, the changing of ownership through chmod command was made necessary for the sharing with external people I believe.

Thank you.

Lance

MacBook

Posted on Jan 21, 2021 12:14 AM

Best reply

lanceloz Author

Level 1

14 points

Posted on Jan 21, 2021 9:56 AM

Problem solved. For some reasons, the files I wanted to apply the quick action onto were "locked". So in order to unlock them first, i inserted an Apple Script in my quick action (just before the Shell script) which reads:

on run {input, parameters}

tell application "Finder"

repeat with theItem in input

set locked of theItem to false as boolean

end repeat

end tell

return input

end run

it does the job of unlocking the files first before to change their permissions.

I haven't figured out yet why the files are now "locked", especially the PDF ones.

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lanceloz Author

Level 1

14 points

Jan 21, 2021 9:56 AM in response to lanceloz

on run {input, parameters}

tell application "Finder"

repeat with theItem in input

set locked of theItem to false as boolean

end repeat

end tell

return input

end run

it does the job of unlocking the files first before to change their permissions.

I haven't figured out yet why the files are now "locked", especially the PDF ones.

Jan 21, 2021 12:19 PM in response to lanceloz

The shell version of your AppleScript, providing the file was not locked by a system process, is:

for f in "$@"
do
   chflags nouchg "$f"  # remove the user level lock on the files
   chmod u=rwx,g=rx,o=rx "$f"  # same as 755. no -R as these are files, not folders
done

If the files were locked by a system process, then you will need the following with a sudo password:

sudo chflags noschg "$f"

lanceloz Author

Level 1

14 points

Jan 21, 2021 12:24 PM in response to VikingOSX

Thanks. I did not know all this. :-) I will try to improve my script.

Automator quick action needs fixing