How to do multiple shell scripts in AppleScript

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Level 1

4 points

How to do multiple shell scripts in AppleScript

I got some solutions from previous posts on how to run sudo in Applescript, but there is still some minor syntax issues when I try to get to the destination directory. Usually in shell script I just type

cd directory-destination
...

in several lines to batch process those commands, but when I work with applescript, if I do do shell script for every "cd" command, instead of getting an overall result, I would get intermediate results individually.

I read doc and learned that there might be a way to put commands together by using the & sign?

Message was edited by: ttback

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Sep 7, 2010 11:14 AM

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Answer 1

red_menace

Level 6

17,066 points

Sep 7, 2010 11:57 AM in response to ttback

An individual do shell script command runs in its own shell, so to perform multiple commands within that shell you need to combine them into a single statement. You can use the ampersand '&' operator to concatenate text strings, and the semicolon ';' to separate the commands, for example:

set theFolder to "/Applications"
do shell script "cd " & theFolder & "; ls -l ."

See the technical note do shell script in AppleScript.

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