[Pythonmac-SIG] "Trashing" a file

[Niko Matsakis]

Thanks; I'll give this a try.  Converting an Alias to a path isn't too 
difficult, there's an example in one of the sample appscripts I 
believe.


Niko

On May 7, 2005, at 1:00 AM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

> On May 6, 2005, at 6:31 PM, Niko Matsakis wrote:
>
>> I am working on a python program that needs to trash some files.
>> Ideally, I would like it to move them to the Trash, but I'm not quite
>> sure what the best way to do this is.
>>
>> For context, I am using appscript to talk to iTunes and load its list
>> of songs.  This works great.  Among other things, the program can then
>> find albums that have multiple copies of the same track and purge 
>> them.
>>
>> iTunes gives me back an FSAlias object as the location of the track,
>> which appears to come from the much maligned Carbon standard module.
>>
>> I have tried deleting the file by doing:
>>
>>     appscript.app ('Finder').delete (aliasobject)
>>
>> This actually does work --- the Finder makes a little trashing noise,
>> and the file ends up in the trash --- but it also throws an exception,
>> which makes me mildly uncomfortable.  Here is the actual output:
>>
>>
>>> ;pythonw test.py
>>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>>>   File "test.py", line 11, in ?
>>>     app ('finder').delete (tr.location.get())
>>>   File
>>> "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/
>>> python2.3/site-packages/appscript/specifier.py", line 168, in 
>>> __call__
>>>     raise CommandError("Can't do command %r(%s)" % (self, args and
>>> kargs and args + ', ' + kargs or args or kargs), err, trace)
>>> appscript.specifier.CommandError: Can't do command
>>> app(u'/System/Library/CoreServices/
>>> Finder.app').delete([<Carbon.File.Alias object at 0x5f100>,
>>> <Carbon.File.Alias object at 0x5f110>]), Error 0: The operation could
>>> not be completed.
>>> ;
>>>
>>
>> I mean, I could just catch and ignore this exception, but that seems
>> bad.  Any suggestions on what the Right Thing To Do is?
>
> I don't like dealing with apple events very much because they tend to 
> be slow and/or unreliable.. but this is the Cocoa way to do it 
> (untested, but should probably work):
>
> from AppKit import *
> import sys
> import os
>
> def groupFiles(files):
>     dirs = {}
>     enc = sys.getfilesystemencoding()
>     for fn in files:
>         if not isinstance(fn, unicode):
>             fn = unicode(fn, enc)
>         fn = os.path.realpath(fn)
>         dirname, basename = os.path.splitext(fn)
>         try:
>             dirs[dirname].append(basename)
>         except KeyError:
>             dirs[dirname] = [basename]
>     return dirs
>
> def recycleFiles(files, ws=None):
>     if ws is None:
>         ws = NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace()
>     results = []
>     for dirname, files in groupFiles(files).iteritems():
>         res, tag = 
> ws.performFileOperation_source_destination_files_tag_(
>             NSWorkspaceRecycleOperation,
>             dirname,
>             u'',
>             files)
>         results.append((res, tag, dirname, files))
>     return results
>
> You would need to pass a sequence of paths to recycleFiles .. so you'd 
> need to turn those FSAlias objects into POSIX paths (I don't remember 
> how to do it off the top of my head).
>
>> Incidentally, are there searchable archives for this list?  I couldn't
>> seem to find any, just the month-by-month browsable ones...
>
> I don't know.. but there's always Google.  A query that ends with 
> "pythonmac-sig site:mail.python.org" sans quotes is probably only 
> going to turn up results from this list.
>
> -bob
>