I needed to convert a bunch of AppleScript .scpt files to uncompiled .txt files, so a simple find piped to xargs and I’ll be done… well…

OS-X provides a osadecompile cmd that will read a .scpt file and output the text to stdout (It does not provide a output file option). So a simple redirection and I should be done:

# This will not work, you will end up with a file 
# named {}.txt that includes the test of all the scripts
find *.scpt -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 -I {} osadecompile '{}' > '{}.txt' 

But that will not work as the redirection applies to the xargs cmd, not the osadecompile cmd that xargs is calling. So a quick fix is to create a subshell and include the redirection in the passed cmd string (via -c)

So this will work:

find *.scpt -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 -I {} sh -c "osadecompile '{}' > '{}.txt'"

Still simple enough, and since I only have a couple of dozen files in this case the performance impact of creaing subshells is not a problem…

Homework: How would you get around this in using a bash one-liner without a subshell?