Specifying a File by Reference

To save a reference of the form file nameString in a variable, you can use the A Reference To operator as shown in the example that follows.



 
tell application "Finder"

    set fileRef to a reference to file "Hard Disk:June Sales"

    --result: file "Hard Disk:June Sales" of application "Finder"

end tell

tell application "AppleWorks"

    open fileRef

end

When you specify a file with a file reference, the file must exist at the time a statement that uses the reference is executed.

You cannot coerce a filename string to a file reference. For example, you cannot replace the second line of the previous script with the following line:

set fileRef to ("Hard Disk:June Sales" as file) --result: error!

However, you can perform a similar coercion with the alias form, as described in Specifying a File by Alias.