export-LINKFILE.url-from-Safari-on-macOS

macOS service allowing the creation of .url links from safari

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Description

I created a small a macOS Safari service. What it does is taking the current tabs url, domain and name and saving it as $name ($domain).url under ~/Downloads. (It is based on hectorpal's bash script from superuser. Thank you for the inspiraton!)

It features the logic not to overwrite existing files, if the resulting name is the same, but the included url would be different, but adds a number (starting from 2) to the filename instead.

As you can assign custom shortcuts to services I choose ctrl s.

Download

Download the file from releases and move, once extracted to ~/Library/Services.

Usage

In Safari you will find the service under Safari -> Services -> domain.url in the menubar.

Additional Information

This can be easily adopted to other macOS browsers if they feature Automator support, but would require additional logic, if they don't. Feel free to tinker around.

As of now (presumably macOS 10.4 to macOS 11.2.3) the service works fine.

The "magic" is done by executing a small shell script after getting the current tabs URL using a Automator script.

#!/bin/bash
url=$@
tab=$(osascript -e 'tell application "Safari" to return name of front document' | tr -s '/' '|' | cut -d':' -f2- | awk '{$1=$1};1' )
name=~/Downloads/$tab" ("$(echo $url  | awk -F/ '{print $3}' | sed 's/www*\.//' )")"
ext=.url
if [[ -f "$name$ext" && ! $(grep -Fx "URL="$url $name$ext) ]] ; then
    i=2
    while [[ -f "$name-$i$ext" && ! $(grep -Fx "URL="$url $name-$i$ext) ]] ; do
   		let i++
    done
    name=$name-$i
fi
file=$name$ext
echo '[InternetShortcut]' > "$file"
echo -n 'URL=' >> "$file"
echo $url >> "$file"
#echo 'IconIndex=0' >> "$file"