Flexing my geek muscle

[drwex]

tl;dr - I use my minuscule shell skills and some ingenuity to subvert Mac stupidity in service of my kid's homework.

Set-up: Thing 2 needs to print out some screenshots from Minecraft for his homework. Of course he's left this to the last minute so after returning from King Richard's Faire we're up against the evening deadline to get this done.

Start: To all appearances the screenshots he claims to have created from Minecraft are not there. Really?

First, research all the places that the Web guidelines say that screenshots get saved. Fight with Finder to see all of them. They all appear empty. Dafuq?

Run Minecraft, verify that the kids haven't configured it to save shots in a new place.

Double-check that these places are showing empty in Finder. Curse Apple.

Bring up a command line and "find / -print" those places. cd to each of them and verify that they are in fact empty.

Start to doubt that any screenshots were saved. Re-run Minecraft and create a new screenshot. Fortunately, the game has a standard naming format for its shots. Back to Finder, ask it to locate the screenshot we just saved. "BWAH HAHA HA," says Finder. "U no can haz screenshot!"

Screw you, says I and go back to the command shell, whereupon another "find / -print" command locates not just the new screenshot but also the shots that Thing 2 saved earlier. They're in a different place than the Web pages claimed. Whatever. Now I have an ls of the files in the shell window, I can just navigate Finder to the parent directory and ...

What do you mean Finder won't display the directory? What sort of BS is this? Curse Apple a lot more.

Fiddle with Finder a lot. Pygment fiddles with it some more. No joy. It simply will not show this directory. Uncle Apple knows best! May whatever idiot Jobs hired to code this thing rot from the fingertips upward.

Start to get creative. Grab a USB stick - I can just cp the files to the stick and put the stick into another system. Discover that although Finder can see the stick I can't figure out where in the file system it exists so I can't cp the files over to it.

Then it occurs to me that we have Dropbox installed on this machine and Pygment's machine can see things Dropbox is sharing off the laptop, so if I can get the files into Dropbox she can get them. Better, it turns out Dropbox has a folder that Finder can see. Also, that folder is in a pretty obvious location so I can cp all the screenshots over there and PRESTO they appear in Finder and can be printed.

Do geek dance of victory.

Comments

[ron_newman]

If you cd to this 'unfindable' directory in the shell, and then type this:

open .

what happens?

[drwex]

I'll try to remember to test this when I get home tonight.

[wotw]

Thank you for posting this just as I was beginning to think about shopping for a new machine, and for reminding me of exactly why an Apple product is always a mistake.

[drwex]

It's funny in that Apple both caused and solved the problem. The Finder caused a problem that I was able to solve only because MacOS is built on a *nix core and I can pop open a shell window anytime I want. I mostly can't do this on PCs except CygWin sort of gives me work-arounds.

Given the smattering you've reported about how you operate it feels like some sort of *nix machine would be most suited to your style - what sort of thing are you thinking of getting?

[wotw]

I currently run Windows Vista, doing a lot of my work in command windows where I run DOS, Cygwin and 4NT, and frequently write shell scripts that combine commands from all three of these. I've been doing that for decades (with earlier versions of Windows and of 4NT), and it works very well for me.

One of the many reasons I hate my iPhone is that it goes to such lengths to hide its directory structure from me (though I've largely overcome this via jailbreaking and a whole lot of amateur hacking). It sounds from your post that I was right in my guess that all Apple products would be equally infuriating.

[drwex]

I have a special dislike for iPhones, but that's due to Apple's misery-inducing monopolistic App Store practices. The iPhone is such a closed and regulated environment it's startling, since most Macs have not been.

That you can get anything done in Vista amazes me. I hung onto XP as long as possible, then went directly to 7. If you get a new PC you can generally get it with 7 installed, but will have to ask for that.

[wotw]

I spent a long time tweaking Vista to make it behave exactly as I want to. Given that, I am loathe ever to "upgrade" to Windows 7 or 8, for fear I'll have a similarly lengthy process ahead of me.

[macthud]

Mac stupidity?

No, this is Minecraft stupidity.

When you take Mac OS X screenshots, they go to a clearly documented standard location -- your Desktop -- which is always visible and accessible to you, and they're named according to a very simple convention, "Screen shot 2012-08-07 at 09.30.42 AM.png".

Minecraft chose to save to a strange location. I can't say why you had such difficulty working with that location and its contents, but I'm guessing, even betting, on them saving with strange permissions.

Given that you can see that location and its contents through Terminal.app, Ron's suggestion of "open ." when in that location (or just "open /path/to/dir" regardless of your Terminal.app pwd) should make those shots visible through the Finder.

Also, you can "open -a Preview /path/to/file" to bring them up in Preview.app. Change "Preview" as appropriate to use a different app, for file formats Preview can't handle or if you prefer a different graphic handler. Change to "open -e /path/to/textfile" to open a text file in TextEdit.app.

I submit that your curse on Jobs' code minion should be retracted.

[drwex]

Feh. I agree that Minecraft ought not to be stuffing its shots into undocumented (or even counter-documentation) locations, but there's no excuse for Finder not showing me the directory once I'd found it.

I wasn't aware of the open(1) command. Interesting shortcut, but it just reinforces my belief that whoever coded Finder did so wrongly, such that they had to provide an extra command-line program (or maybe it's a shell command) to get around it. The curse stands.

[macthud]

~/Library/ and its contents aren't ordinary user-space. They're accessible by the clueful, but fiddling in there can cause lots of trouble, so they're invisible by default -- akin to files named with leading "." in *nix (including OS X's Finder and your *nix shells -- go digging for ~/.ssh -- I'll wait).

Here, have 18 ways to deal with such. My personal choice (dating back to very early in OS X's life) is their last -- "Show all hidden files" -- which I believe I enabled using TinkerTool.app, but there are other GUI tools that provide similar, as well as the simple command they provide. Whether you want to leave that open for the Things ... that's another question.

[aelscha.livejournal.com]

As well as ~/Library/ , the other case I can think of where Finder would do something unexpected compared to directly navigating the filesystem is if Minecraft saved the images inside an application package.

Wex, the USB stick is probably mounted under /Volumes, which I know is no longer useful, but, well, I can't resist.

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

...and any device you mount like that should show up as a readable volume on the desktop, and/or under Devices in the Finder's sidebar.

[ron_newman]

I'm curious now -- what is the exact directory path where Minecraft put these screenshots (and Finder couldn't find them)?

[shades-of-nyx.livejournal.com]

Laughs...
I have had this night many times...

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on prevailing!

I used Windows XP for many years and recently switched to Windows 8. I'm finding 8 to be ridiculous to work with, since the default permission for nearly everything is "you can't do anything with the files." There's a way around that, of course, and I can copy and paste and move and delete now that I've found it, but for awhile, Norman overheard me saying things like, "Me person, you computer. YOU obey ME!"

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

Your USB stick will have been mounted in /Volumes/.

But, yeah, the open command is the best bet in this situation.

Although... Did "Go to Folder..." under the Go menu in Finder bring you no joy?

Also, there's some command you can run in Terminal to turn on the option to show EVERYTHING in Finder.

Tried those

[sweetmmeblue.livejournal.com]

Failed. Go to folder didn't work cause there seems to no longer be that function that we could find. And yes, we asked it to show everything. It didn't show up.

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

yep, that's the Mac for you. pesky AND complex. :)
it's really awesome -- until it isn't.