The posted code doesn't compile. There's a spurious open-paren here:
Code:
set (theName to theName + 1
You should probably study exactly how AppleScript's file access commands work.
When you write posBody to a file, it's written as a 32-bit big-endian integer. That is, as four binary bytes. The 'cat' command will simply output those four binary bytes, but the rest of your program is assuming that cat's output will be text, i.e. a numeric string. This fails because you get a binary representation (4 binary bytes) instead of a text representation (2 ASCII characters.)
If you want to write a numeric string (again, study the file access commands), then you must explicitly say that in the script:
Code:
write posBody to posReference as string
[See EDIT below.]
You could also sidestep much of AppleScript's file access by using shell commands. Example:
Code:
do shell script "echo " & theName & " >" & quoted form of (POSIX path of posFileLoc)
So the entire AppleScript to read the value, increment it, and write it back to the same file would be:
Code:
set posFileLoc to ((path to home folder as text) & "TestFolder:Position.txt")
set theName to (do shell script "cat " & quoted form of (POSIX path of posFileLoc))
set theName to theName + 1
do shell script "echo " & theName & " >" & quoted form of (POSIX path of posFileLoc)
In general, it's a bad idea to mix shell commands with AppleScript file access, unless you're very careful about exactly what data representation is being read and written. If you'd opened and read the file using AppleScript commands, it might have worked. But then the first read would fail, because the data in the file would be "10" (ASCII chars, numeric text) instead of 4 hex bytes: 00 00 00 0A.
EDIT
Before writing the string data, you should first truncate the file to zero length. This ensures that only the most recently written string is the entire file's contents.
Code:
set eof of posReference to 0
write posBody to posReference as string
The 'echo' shell script already truncates, so it's fine as-is.
