Mac Geekery

I was recently considering writing a Finder Contextual Menu plug-in that would copy the POSIX path of a file or directory into the clipboard when you right clicked on the file and choose "Copy Path".

I thought someone might have done this before, so I searched around and found this article, Writing Contextual Menu Plugins for OS X, that used that concept as it's example project and included the Xcode project source code. I updated the project for Xcode 2.4.1 and made it Universal without to much difficulty, and just thought that I would point others over to this useful piece of software. I've attached my updated project here.There's more »

Recently I needed to find a way to add open ports to the built-in Apple firewall from the command line in a way that would NOT disable the firewall GUI in System Preferences. Many people suggest just running ipfw commands from the command line, but this disables the GUI and was therefore not a workable solution, and I was unable to find anything documented, but after some poking around I was able to get this working reliably.

I have a version of this script that will add a Firewall entry into Panther systems as well, but it does not automatically activate it. If anyone can fiqure out how to get an automatically enabled entry to work in Panther I would love to hear about it.

SeanThere's more »

#!/bin/bash

# Mac OS X Script to open up the firewall port for the Retrospect client in a proper manner and
# disabled stealth mode.