Comments on: The most idiotic design decision in Unix/Mac OS X

By: Aleksandar

Aleksandar — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:46:34 +0000

Klokie, tnx. Nice one-liner.

By: klokie

klokie — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:09:49 +0000

Hi Aleksandar,
I came across your post as I was just bitten by the same bug — I certainly wouldn’t call it a feature, having migrated to Mac from the Linux and Windows systems which have always supported recursive merges.

I even tried 6 data recovery programs, and none of them could find any traces of the directory that had been replaced!

What I would suggest to you, as I will do in the future, is either to use rsync (as another user has suggested) as I usually do for machine-to-machine copies or “cp –v –npR source/* destination/”, which should give you the recursive merge you might expect.

By: ryan

ryan — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:50:34 +0000

I definitely agree. I’ve used both for some time and what I’ve found is that I, at least, usually want to merge contents when copying a folder… My intention is rarely to replace the folder. It is to merge. Almost always.

In my opinion the default behaviour should be to merge with a modifier key to replace. I would accept vice versa as well, but there you go.

By: Chris Hester

Chris Hester — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:36:31 +0000

I’m with the first commenter. However I try it, moving a folder with the same name just puts the folder inside the other folder. The second commenter is referring to copying files, not moving folders.

By: Tim Connor

Tim Connor — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 01:04:02 +0000

Yeah, it’s a painful lesson to learn and one could argue that the rsync approach of having to use a parameter to perform deletes (which could be holding a modifier key down in a gui drag/drop) is less surprising. In fact, now that I think of it, that is how it should work.

By: Aleksandar

Aleksandar — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:02:26 +0000

Tim, you just gave me a homework. Investigate rsync 1st.

Problem here is that I was updating an old client site, which runs mostly without me, for years. A rather small update and I managed to kill entire resource (icons, images) folder they gathered for months (years).
One backup + 3 different discs dusted off + 4h wasted and we are mostly back in business.

Deleting some would be problem in that case, Tim. I have no idea but manually or scripting.

By: matthijs

matthijs — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:23:30 +0000

Ok, that’s a situation in which I can understand your annoyance. In a situation like that you could try a subversion system. Then updating, merging and possibly rolling back is very easy.

By: Tim Connor

Tim Connor — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:50:44 +0000

Oh, and if you like the windows approach, which does have it’s niceties I’ll admit, how would you manage updating a bunch of files, adding some, and deleting others, in one step? That sort of thing is as frequent of a use case, almost.

By: Tim Connor

Tim Connor — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:49:12 +0000

Alek — welcome to the world of Unix that most of us have been dealing with for hosting the whole time. :)

I’d rarely updated a website by just copying over samba anyways, or from an archive. First preference is always to use svn/svk/git or some other SCM — not versioning something like a live website is pure insanity. Fallback from that is rsync, which will do exactly what you want. Next down the list, using diff/patch. Next, using an ftp client that does smart diffing. Finally, in last place, manually copying over the files.