I have these lines of (probably incompetent) code in an application:
set vmPath to (path to me) & "Contents:Resources:Files:MacOS.sheepvm" as string
set vmFile to vmPath as alias
set vmPosix to (POSIX path of vmFile) as string
set extfsPath to (vmPosix & "extfspath")
They cause no problem when I run my application, but if I try to run it SD, I get this error:
Stopped:(Error: File Macintosh HD:Users:edward:Desktop:Mac OS 9.app::Contents:Resources:Files:MacOS.sheepvm wasn't found.)
Notice the two colons between “app” and “Contents”. I’m assuming that’s the problem.
EDIT: I now see that I can avoid this by replacing all that code with this one line:
set extfsPath to (POSIX path of (path to me)) & "Contents/Resources/Files/MacOS.sheepvm/extfspath"
But perhaps this really is a bug in SD?
What this line of code does is gets path to me, which returns an alias, and therefore the & operator concatenates it with the following string, producing {alias "Macintosh HD:Users:edward:Desktop:Mac OS 9.app:", "Contents:Resources:Files:MacOS.sheepvm"}, which you then coerce to a string with as string, resulting in the alias being coerced to a HFS path, and then joined using whatever your current value for text item delimiters is.
What you probably meant was:
set vmPath to ((path to me) as text) & "Contents:Resources:Files:MacOS.sheepvm"
This no longer relies on the value of text item delimiters, and doesn’t create an otherwise pointless list.
But you should really be using path to resource — it’s designed for getting stuff in the Resources folder. So something like:
set vmPath to path to resource "MacOS.sheepvm" in directory "Files"
Thank you, Shane. I should have known these things, and that part of my code dates back to the time when I had no idea at all of what I was doing. “path to resource” is something I also should have known about. Thank you again!
Just to nit-pick that leaving out the inner parentheses is slightly more efficient:
set vmPath to (path to me as text) & "Contents:Resources:Files:MacOS.sheepvm"
In this form, the as text is a parameter of path to which causes it to return the text directly instead of returning an alias which is then coerced to text.
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