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Comment by earlz | Hacker News Reader

This is the #1 most annoying thing in my recent conversion to working with a Mac. There is literally not a single way I can find to copy the current folder that I'm at in Finder for use in another finder window(ie, open/save files) nor for use in a terminal. Best bet is to two finger tap, get info, copy and paste the messed up "Macintosh HD"ized path, manually convert the Macintosh HD crap to an actual path, and then probably it works and you just wasted 1 minute of your life.

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You can click on the folder icon at the top of a Finder window and drag it into an open/save dialogue, or drag it into a Terminal window to get the absolute path. This works with individual files, too.

You can also drag it onto the Terminal.app dock icon.

If you are in the folder "foo" with no files selected then Cmd-C will copy the address of "/Users/Yourname/foo". You can paste that into the terminal no problem.

If you want to go to a particular path in finder or an open/save dialog, hit cmd-shift-g. Then you can paste your path or use tab completion to get to your directory.

Considering opening the current path in Terminal, there are a few easier ways using Automator[1] or Alfred[2], but from 10.7 on there is a built in feature to do this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/420456/open-terminal-here...

[1] http://peterdowns.com/posts/open-iterm-finder-service.html (iTerm)

[2] http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/1664-open-current-finder-wi...

Not sure exactly what you are trying to do, but dragging a folder from finder into the open/save dialog will normally change directory to the one dropped in.

Give xtraFinder ( http://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/ ) a shot, it'll let you copy paths of a directory, along with a whole other suite of additions. Makes Finder a whole lot better.

This would always piss me off, eventually I put this into my rc file https://gist.github.com/adamnemecek/bf9d8e4c0356bfdd86c2

What I then do is that I select a file in the directory I want to cd into, hit CMD + C, switch to terminal and run sd on CMD+V. The script basically cd's into the same dir as the file you selected.

I realize that this workflow might not be for everyone but it's kind of ok for me.

I doubt it solves all your problems, but for the issue with terminals I recommend Go2Shell[1] which just adds an icon you can click to open a terminal in that window.

[1] http://zipzapmac.com/go2shell

If you happen to use zsh/oh-my-zsh, enable the OSX extension. You can then use the command cdf to jump to the active finder directory and pfd to display the active finder directory.

I use this bash function to get the same effect [1]

[1]: http://git.io/hFmk

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