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OSX: fuck you (it’s about moving folder)!

Links - 29/10/2006 @ 19:24



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Well, you’ve got two folders called “MOVIES” and in one folder you’ve got EPISODE1, EPISODE2, EPISODE3 and inside the other folder you’ve got EPISODE4, EPISODE5 and EPISODE6. If you move one of the two “MOVIES” folder where the other folder is, OSX will ask you if you wanna OVERWRITE the files (also WINDOWS ask you a similar question). Well, OSX will DELETE the destination contents, while WINDOWS will merge the two folders contents (as it should be, right?)

Windows: “MOVIES” will include EPISODE1, EPISODE2, EPISODE3, EPISODE4, EPISODE5, EPISODE6
OSX: “MOVIES” will include only EPISODE4, EPISODE5, EPISODE6 (deleted EPISODE1 to EPISODE3).

This is crazy wrong! OSX, FUCK YOU!

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7 Responses to “OSX: fuck you (it’s about moving folder)!”

DavideNo Gravatar says on November 1st, 2006 at 10:19 am

looks like mac has already watched epi1-3…just joking,
actually a strange behaviour

baldoNo Gravatar says on November 1st, 2006 at 1:09 pm

yea.. when my mac is in sleeping mode, he watches my episodes.. :)

mediamixtureNo Gravatar says on November 2nd, 2006 at 9:18 pm

Yeah, that’s pretty weird. I would argue that both OS’s should not even ask the question for this situation. With this example, there isn’t even a naming conflict so why can’t it merge the files without any user input? In the event there is a filename conflict, why not defer the resolution until the end of the copy process so that I don’t need to sit there and wait for the next question to answer. Even if I chose not to deal with it at that moment, there’s no reason why the OS couldn’t just track those duplicate files so that I could just figure out which one I really wanted at some point in the future.

To me, it just seems like file systems should be smart enough these days to handle this gracefully.

baldoNo Gravatar says on November 2nd, 2006 at 10:08 pm

yea.. mediamixture, you are right.. AND another big problem is that the overwrittten folder is just deleted and not in the trash..

luca maioliNo Gravatar says on November 3rd, 2006 at 3:31 pm

This is not exactly smart, or useful but it is linear. Windows perform a merge and mac osx perform a clear and rewrite. the same as

rm -r MOVIES
cp /pathToOtherMovies/MOVIES .

So it’s not strange, It’s just different. If you want to replace the folder you do replace everything. I think it’s a good deal ;-), you get exactly what you asked.

baldoNo Gravatar says on November 3rd, 2006 at 5:10 pm

Folders are not files. Files should be overwritted. Folder contents should be merged.

this is my view.. but maybe it’s forced by 10 years of Windows use..

luca maioliNo Gravatar says on November 4th, 2006 at 8:57 pm

folders are nodes but (special) files too (in the BSD layer, I can’t remember exactly), so I think it’s right to completely overwrite them. Anyway I was thinking about this post and I come up with a solution (because I like the overwrite thing): let the user choose beetwen merge and overwrite. This whould improve greatly the user experience, IMHO.

BTW in osx you can easily workaround this by using the spring folder feature, placing subfolder wherever you want.

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