Since working on Burnkit’s massive server the last week I’ve frequently come across the need to email the path of a file to another co-worker. I noticed yesterday that Finder doesn’t have a single place to extract the absolute path of your given location, they even tease you with it in “get info” but for some reason it isn’t selectable. The files the team and I are accessing can be 10-20 folders deep, and having a quick hyperlink in an email to it’s exact location is very convenient. Here’s how to hack a path extraction utility for OS X. This little tutorial assumes you use and love Quicksilver, if you don’t have it, we’ll quietly wait for you to go download and install it.

1. Launch Script Editor using quicksilver and copy and paste this code:

tell application "Finder"
set sel to the selection as text
set the clipboard to POSIX path of sel
end tell

2. Save the script in your Library/Scripts folder, name it whatever you like.

3. Open up your Quicksilver preferences and goto Triggers, hit the “+” at the bottom and choose Hotkey. When the dialog appears hold down “/” to get to your root, then go into Library/Scripts/ and select the script you just made. Create a trigger to invoke the script.

When you want the path of a folder or file, select it, then invoke your script using your trigger and the path automagically gets copied to your clipboard. Nice.