The UNIX shell provides a host of extremely useful utilities for modifying text. This OS X Automator service makes all of them available for filtering text in all OS X applications.
This can be handy for performing quick operations, like replacing text with regular expressions, sorting lists or swapping fields around.
When triggered, the service requests a command to use for filtering, then runs the command and replaces the selected text with the result.
Some sample operations:
- Sort lines alphabetically/numerically: sort or sort -n
- Change to lowercase: tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"
- Replace a spelling mistake, taking care of case: sed -E 's/([tT])eh/\1he/g'
- Re-order elements in a tab- or comma-separated list: awk '{print $2 $1}' or awk -F, '{print $2 "," $1}'
Put it in Library/Services, and it should appear in the ‘Services’ menu.
