removing a final space from a file/folder name using AppleScript

Just a claification. Are you looking to get rid of ALL spaces in directory and file names or only spaces and the end of the name?

/path to somewhere/ - no change or /pathtosomewhere/

/path to somewhere / - changed to /path to somewhere/ or /pathtosomewhere/

file name.txt - no change or filename.txt

you get my point.

You mean Bob, lol? I'm Matt - I'm the one who can't program for toffee.

Right having problems with this new system figuring out who's who.

I knew I should have used Perl :-) This script is not very long, but I added a lot of comments to try and expain what I was doing.

OK assuming I understood your new problem, the following perl script might handle both file names with trailing spaces, and filenames with a space between the name and the .type field.

find /path/to/starting/directory -depth -name "* *" | perl -ne ' # Find all files with a space in them
chomp; # remove newline character
if ( /(.*\S)\s+(\.\S+)\s+$/ ) { # find files with spaces before the .type field
#
# The above (...) notation says save what is found in $1
# The 2nd (...) says save what is found in $2
# The .* says match anything
# The \S says match anything except a space
# The \s+ say match 1 or more spaces
# The \. says match . (normally . says match anything, so \. says just .)
# The $ say match end of string
# The \S+ says match 1 or more characters that are not spaces
# The 2 (...) do not include any of the undesired spaces
#
rename $_, $1 . $2; # rename without those spaces
next; # get the next name from the find command
}
if ( /(.*\S)\s+$/ ) { # find files with trailing spaces
#
# The above (...) notation says save what is found in $1
# The .* says match anything
# The \S says match anything except a space
# The \s+ say match 1 or more spaces
# The $ say match end of string
# The (...) does not including any of the trailing spaces
#
rename $_, $1; # rename without the spaces
next; # get the next name from the find command
}
# ignore all remaining files with spaces in them
' # <-- Do not miss the tiny single closing quote :-)

Again, test this script to make sure I did not screw it up. My testing was limited.

Very nice, one question will that catch cases where this is both a space before the extension and a space at the end of the complete name ie:
[file .txt ] and Mat is that even a possibility?

You'll need to cut and paste that into a text file and run it as a shell script

And be careful there are many files in OS X that have spaces in them if you send this off on the wrong path you could have troubles.

You could just copy and paste the script starting with the 'find' command and ending with the last ' and it should just work.

You could use TextWrangler (free and very useful) to create a text file, or the command line 'nano' editor.

If you are going to put the script in a file, then make the very first line

#!/usr/bin/env bash

Which when the script is invoked will specify that the 'bash' shell should be used to interpret it.

After you save the file, set the permissions so it is executable

chmod +x name.of.the.file.with.the.script.in.it

You should then be able to just invoke the script by typing its the path to the file as if it was a command.

Not gonna work pasting into the terminal you'll need to follow bob's direction and create a file for it.