When I started using a script to add items to my TaskPaper file, I was a little worried about the script making changes to my file while it was open in TaskPaper. So I used TaskPaper’s preference to save my files every five seconds, and nothing bad happened for a while.

Then I started seeing corrupted files. It seems like OS X autosave is doing something weird. If I poke at it, I can get parts of the file go missing, or sometimes a dialog box pops up to complain. But everything works fine as long as I do an actual “⌘S” save.

To prevent corruption, I added a few lines to my shell script, which use AppleScript to save my TaskPaper file before making the changes. I use pgrep to check if TaskPaper is running, and a heredoc to send the text of the script to the osascript binary.

if pgrep TaskPaper > /dev/null; then
/usr/bin/osascript << EOM
tell application "TaskPaper"
    repeat with Doc in documents whose name is "tasks.taskpaper"
    save Doc
    end repeat
end tell
EOM
fi

(It is so much easier to embed AppleScript in a bash script than the other way around.)