I have to work with people that use windows. There is no getting away from it. Not only that but I have to run their email systems.
One thing that really gets my goat is attaching files to an internal email when those files are available on a shared drive within the organization. I have spent years ranting on about this and in the last year I seem to be finally getting through to those I work with.
However I moved from using Windows to using Ubuntu Linux some time ago. So now while my windows using collegues have finally grasped sending round links to files rather than attaching them I cannot reciprocate easiy. The best I can do is copy the file path and paste it into the email. Ubuntu file paths have forward slashes / while windows has to be different and uses back slashes. My work mates therefore can only use my file locations as a guide to manually drill down the folder structure to the file rather than simply being able to click on the link.
Oh how they moan. And as I have spent years berating them for not using file links they also understandably tease a little. So I created a method to solve this problem.
My solution is to
- create a script that will replace forward slashes with back slashes
- change the beginning of my file paths from /home/damien/mount (where I mount the windows shared drives on my machine using cifs) to file:///\\server-name\volume-name\drive-name so they become clickable links in Windows
- run the script from a right click menu on selecting the file in question
To add a menu item to the right click I install gnome-actions:
sudo apt-get install gnome-actions
To enable me to copy the modified file path to the clipboard install xclip:
sudo apt-get install xclip
Then I create the new menu item:
System > Preferences > Nautilus Actions Configuration
Click Add
Make a label which will appear in the menu. I named it "Create Win Link"
Choose a Tooltip and icon is you wish.
Add the path to your script, which we will create in a minute. mine is /home/damien/winlink
We want to pass the path to the selected file to the script so enter %M in the Parameters field.
The menu item is done. Now for the script.
Create the file:
nano /home/damien/winlink (in my case)
I am using {string//$match/$replacement} to replace ALL instances of match that occur in string with replacement
Note is you just want to replace the first occurance the syntax is {string/$match/$replacement} (note single forward slash after string). For more on string manipulation in bash have a look here.
I expect my code could be more concise but it does the job. To make it simpler I have only set this up for our main shared drive, it made the string substitutions easier for now.
Then copy the modified file path to the clip board using xclip:
echo ${MY_MODIFED_PATH} | xclip -selection clipboard
Here is my final script:
#! /bin/bash
match='/'
repl='\'
match2='/home/damien/mounts/Team_Drive/'
repl2='file:///\\server\volumelabel\Team%20Drive\'
match3=' '
repl3='%20'
MY_PATH="$1"
MY_PATH2=${MY_PATH//$match/$repl}
MY_PATH3=${MY_PATH//$match3/$repl3}
echo ${MY_PATH3//$match2/$repl2} | xclip -selection clipboard
I can now right click any file on the shared drive and select Copy Win Link from the menu and simply paste it into an email.
People using Windows7 with Office/Outlook 2007 see this as a link in the received email which they can click on to open the original file. Unfortunately for those using Office/Outlook 2003 it does not appear as a link, however they can still copy and paste it into their file manager and it does the same thing. I will post back here if I find a fix for this in Outlook 2003
I can now follow my own best practice!
