Making folders for one month

Here's a very basic example of how you could write your script…

click here to open this script in your editor <pre style="font-family: 'Monaco', 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; overflow:auto; color: #222; background: #DDD; padding: 0.2em; font-size: 10px; width:400px">tell application "Finder"
set target_folder to target of front Finder window
repeat with x from 1 to 31
if x < 10 then set x to "0" & x
make new folder at target_folder with properties {name:"2006-01-" & x}
end repeat
end tell</pre>This will generate the folders inside the folder of the frontmost Finder window. Note that the month "2006-01-" is hardcoded, as well as the number of days, 31.

This expand from what Michael has, it'll check for all valid dates:

repeat with y from 1 to 12
if y < 10 then set y to "0" & y
repeat with x from 1 to 31
if x < 10 then set x to "0" & x
try
set the_date to (y & "-" & x & "-2006") as string
date the_date
make new folder at target_folder with properties {name:"2006-" & y & "-" & x}
on error
exit repeat
end try
end repeat
end repeat

Colin,

Just curious why you wouldn't want to use iCal to create a work calendar and set up events that call an AppleScript or Automator action that creates a folder.

This would give you much more flexibility. You could control whether you want it everyday or just Mon-Fri, not on holidays, automatically produce them for the right number of days/month, and know when it was a leap year.

Colin,
Why not have cron make the folder early each morning for you?
Here is the unix command to make the folder with todays date at Users/Shared:

mkdir /Users/Shared/`date "+20%y-%m-%d"`

This way you don't have to count days of the month or have a big stack of unused folders. Sort by name and today's is always at the end of the list.

(Note: the man pages says that 'c' should make note the year with century, as in 2006 instead of 06, but it did not work for me so I used 20. So write me a nasty note in 94 years.)
(Also note the tic mark is not a single quote, it's the key above the Tab key.)

Reese

reese, drop the "20" use cap "Y"

Colin,
CrinniX is a GUI to configure cron. Corn is the Unix daemon which executes scheduled tasks. A daemon is a process which hangs around in the background waiting for something reason to activate, like a scheduled event in the case of cron.
In the "Command" box Cronnix is looking for a unix command (putting AppleScript would be another conversation).
Is HD Server Data 1 a local disk or a mounted server?
If it is a local disk then the Unix command will look like this:

mkdir -p "/DATABASES/2BPRINTED/"`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`

If it is a mounted server then it will look like this:

mkdir -p "/Volumes/HD Server Data 1/DATABASES/2BPRINTED/"`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`

If it is a mounted sever talk to your Admin about running this command on the server so that it runs even when the client is on vacation.

Note the -p after the mkdir. This will make all of the parent directories in the path even if they do not exist.

You can test the command by opening Terminal (in App/Utilities) and paste the command in at the prompt. If it works then the Terminal will act like nothing happened. It will only comment in the case of an error.

Reese

--Mark thanks for the Y tip.

Colin,
So glad to hear progress.
View mail with "mail".
It's not very intuitive if you are used to Apple Mail or any other moder GUI app.
in the terminal type:
mail <return>

continue <return>s until all of the message as been displayed. Type the q key to quit. (no modifier, just the letter q)

Reese

Colin,
Sure. One of the really cool things Apple did was provide a way to integrate AS and shell scripts.
Put this line in a Script Editor doc and save as an application:
do shell script "mkdir -p \"/DATABASES/2BPRINTED/\"`date \"+%Y-%m-%d\"`"

The forward slashes (\) tell AppleScript to ignore the following quote marks. (Officially known as escaping a special character.)

Reese