Oleg's Mac Development Weblog

A simple call to OSA from Terminal gets the UNIX paths common Mac locations.

$ osascript -e 'path to desktop'
alias Macintosh HD:Users:olegyk:Desktop:

$ osascript -e 'POSIX path of (path to desktop)'
/Users/user/Desktop/

$ osascript -e 'POSIX path of (path to fonts)'
/System/Library/Fonts/

$ osascript -e 'POSIX path of "LaCie"'
/Volumes/LaCie

MacOSX.com - [HOWTO] - Use iTunes as an alarm clock

Used UNIX cron to run AppleScript at specific times.

Simple and clean implementation. Complete explanation.

In Carbon, most functions return error as OSStatus integer code. In all code I have seen so far, the programmer has to expect certain result codes and supply custom error messages to the user:

OSStatus err = Call(...);
if (err == errSomeError) {
    Alert("This error occurred.");
}

I am looking for a way to generically obtain the system error message. Similar to how it is done on Windows.

The FormatMessage function can be used to obtain error message strings for the system error codes returned by GetLastError, as shown in the following sample code.

LPVOID lpMsgBuf;

FormatMessage( 
    FORMAT_MESSAGE_ALLOCATE_BUFFER | FORMAT_MESSAGE_FROM_SYSTEM | 
    FORMAT_MESSAGE_IGNORE_INSERTS, NULL, GetLastError(),
    MAKELANGID(LANG_NEUTRAL, SUBLANG_DEFAULT), // Default language
    (LPTSTR) &lpMsgBuf, 0, NULL );

MessageBox( NULL, (LPCTSTR)lpMsgBuf, "Error", MB_OK | MB_ICONINFORMATION );
LocalFree( lpMsgBuf );

This is a test posting.

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