Try taking the " ' " out of the hard drive name, ie. re name the hard drive to "BillsHD" instead of "Bill'sHD" then change this line from: open file "Bill'sHD:Users:billsteele:Desktop:foo.txt" to: open file "BillsHD:Users:billsteele:Desktop:foo.txt" See if that works if that's not particularly palatable then you could also try (in the script only): open file "Bill\'sHD:Users:billsteele:Desktop:foo.txt" But I don't know if the \ is the escape character in apple script, someone here will correct me if i'm wrong. Dave. Apostrophes aren't special in AppleScript strings; there's no need to escape them at all. Backslash (\) is indeed the escape character, but it's only legal in front of double quotation marks (") or another backslash. If you're using do shell script, "quoted form of" automatically handles apostrophes correctly (though you're probably better off not looking at the result :)).