10.4: Make any folder a burn folder

Sep 23, '05 09:00:00AM

Contributed by: TrumpetPower!

Tiger only hintIf you haven't yet realized just how useful burn folders are in Tiger, this hint should do the trick for you.

Though there's a fair amount of behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on to handle burn folders, all they are to the filesystem are normal folders whose names end in .fpbf. Unfortunately, you can't create (or rename) folders with that extension from the Finder (except, of course, by using the GUI to explicitly create a burn folder). However, there's absolutely nothing preventing you from doing so in Terminal.

Creating a burn folder from Terminal is trivial, but not perhaps so exciting. All you do is type:

mkdir "Your Name Here.fpbf"
Replace Your Name Here with the name you'd like to apply to the new burn folder, hit Return, and you'll have a new burn folder, located in whatever directory you were in when you ran the command.

What is exciting is turning a normal folder into a burn folder, burning a disc, and then turning the folder back into a normal folder. First, turn the normal folder into a burnable folder:
mv "Your Name Here" "Your Name Here.fpbf"
In this case, Your Name Here is the name of the existing folder to convert into a burnable folder. After you burn the folder, use this command to switch it back:
mv "Your Name Here.fpbf" "Your Name Here"
There's no need to mess around with aliases or the like; burn folders are happy to burn real files just as well as aliases. I'm sure this would be a trivial thing for some enterprising soul to put into a script for the Finder's contextual menu for those who don't care for Terminal. I'd love to see a future version of OS X do away with the concept of burn folders altogether and simply make every folder burnable. (Anybody at Apple reading this?). In the interim, though, this is a good workaround.

[robg adds: I tried to make an Automator action to handle the conversion to/from a burnable folder, but ran into a slight snag: Automator won't remove the extension from the folder. The command to add the extension runs fine in Automator (so I have a usable 'Make Burnable' action), but the command to remove the extension does not -- even though it works perfectly in the Terminal. I've sent this glitch in to the Automator team, and I'll post back if I find a successful workaround. (I had Doug Adams try an AppleScript to remove the extension, but it also failed).]

November 1 Update: OS X 10.4.3 breaks the Automator actions discussed in this hint and comments. It seems, but I have yet to prove it completely, that "get specified Finder items" now grabs the contents of a folder, rather than the folder itself.]

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