Maybe everyone who’s ever done anything with Perl has written an email extraction script, but a recent client request asked us to take it one step further: allow the script to function as a Mac OS X “droplet.” In other words, the script should be an icon in the Finder, and when files are dragged and dropped on the icon, it should run the script.
This was easy in the days of Mac OS 9 and MacPerl; because there was no Unix core to the Mac OS, MacPerl was the only Perl environment, and the MacPerl environment took care of things like drag-and-drop file access (after all, that was the only way to provide a filename as an argument to a Perl script on a Mac.) Nowadays, with a standard Unix-y Perl shipping with the Mac OS, MacPerl is no longer needed, but the handy drag-and-drop functions aren’t there.
Filling the gap is Platypus, a handy little utility which makes application bundles out of Unix scripts. Notice I didn’t say “Perl” there. Platypus plays nicely with shell scripts, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Tcl just as easily as Perl. As the developer describes it, “this is done by wrapping the script in an application bundle directory structure along with an executable binary that runs the script.”
Advanced options allow you to configure how script output is shown, whether to allow dropped files as input (you can also filter which file types are accepted) and what to do at script conclusion.
In the case of our email extraction utility, which originally spat out the addresses it found on STDOUT, we found that displaying the script output in a text window for some reason only read one input file. We adjusted the script to write output to a file, then used the text window to show which files were read and the path to the output file (as well as any errors), and that adjustment allowed for multiple input files.
If you’ve ever wanted to double-click your scripts rather than running them from the command line, give Platypus a look.
