In Mac OS X's Terminal app, it's quite common (for me at least) to be working away in a directory and want to then view that folder in the Finder; whether to browse around or attach a file or what have you.
This is easily done with ‘
open .’, which takes the current directory (.) and opens it using Mac OS X's default application for that filetype (in this case, Finder for a folder).However, after doing this a few times you end up with multiple windows open in the Finder, and it's all rather cluttered.
I attempt to only have three Finder windows open at any one time: two view-by-columns browsing windows, and one view-as-list Downloads folder (it's a bit of a dumping ground). So when I want to view the current directory from Terminal, it'd be better if I could just change the current view of one of my windows to where I'd like to go.
AppleScript is your friend for any such task, and while I could do more to make this fancy (like switch away from the Downloads folder if necessary, etc.) here's a shell script (I call it
fin) to do exactly that:#!/bin/bash
osascript -e "tell application \"Finder\" to activate" \
-e "tell application \"Finder\" to set the folder of the front window to POSIX file \"`pwd`\" " > /dev/null
Save this as a text file in
~/bin/ (which might need to be added to your path by default; no longer sure), then hit chmod +x fin (assuming you call it fin like me) and your new command fin is ready to go.Better.