How to get the selected item in Finder using AppleScript

• Tagged with applescript, macos
• Posted 26 June 2024

I was doing some stuff today where I was selecting items in Finder, and then passing them to a command-line app in Terminal. I could drag-and-drop the files into Terminal to get their path, but for hundreds of items that gets tedious – I wanted a way for Terminal to automatically get the current item in Finder.

I found an AppleScript that does this:

tell application "Finder" to get POSIX path of first item of (selection as alias list)

Open questions if I decide to revisit this snippet:

• How does this work? I’m not sure what as alias list is doing here.

• How do I get the paths of multiple selected items? AppleScript has access to them in the selection variable, but passing a list of paths between programs is somewhat tricky – see e.g. problems with parsing the output of ls(1). Maybe rewrite this code in JXA and return a JSON array?