ThisService promises to turn any AppleScript or shell script into a live, working, entry in the much-ignored Services menu. And yes, it will take input text and do something with it, so your hopes of turning random selected text into, say, a note in KGTD (or something purple) can now come true.

It’s a perfect Halloween gift for the compulsive scripter in your family.

My favorite unixy scripting language has been married to my favorite all purpose Mac scripting language! RubyOSA provides hooks for Ruby to access AppleScript (a.k.a. the Open Scripting Architecture). This might keep me busy for a while…

Andy Herbert released a bitchin’ (did I just date myself?) little bundle for TextMate, which takes any shell script you whip up in TextMate and turns it into a Dashboard widget. Click the widget, run the script. Easy as can be.

ss64.com hosts this awesome reference to every single command line program and option available in MacOS X, Linux (Bash), Windows and (ugh) Oracle.

Wonderful reference and a great companion to Apple’s shell scripting primer.

Visor, the new application from Blacktree, creates a half-screen terminal window that pops up with the press of a hot key. This terminal is persistent, so when it’s in the background, it just keeps on going and going and going.

Very clever little hack, and extremely useful if you’re prone to bouncing between the terminal and your desktop.

The only problem I’ve had with it is that it’s only one window. So I invoke screen as soon as it starts up, and that pretty much takes care of it.

Thanks, Blacktree!

Very basic script which allows you to send text from LaunchBar to the Terminal as a command. Just select this script in LaunchBar, hit the space bar, and type your terminal command. The command will execute in the first available session, or open a new session if all current sessions are busy.