Craig Burton - Latest Comments in Sometimes the Mac OS Sucks

Re: Sometimes the Mac OS Sucks

James — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:53:15 -0000

It sucks very often. These are only few things that is really annoying. But there is so much more with have been hidden under shiny logo :)

Re: Sometimes the Mac OS Sucks

SD — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:47:11 -0000

On Windows 2000 Server, if the directories a' and a'' each have files within, named b' and b'' respectively, and you drag a' into the directory containing a'', b'' will be replaced by b'. File c' from a' and d'' from a'' will both be in the merged folder, but b'' is gone. Oops. To be fair, it warns you you're about to make a mess.

Re: Sometimes the Mac OS Sucks

craigburton — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:32:33 -0000

On any platform except the Macintosh, If you drag a folder "a" from one location to a folder named "a" in another location the system will combine the contents of a' with a''. On the Macintosh, a' will delete a'' and all of its contents.

The syntax you indicated does indeed work.

Re: Sometimes the Mac OS Sucks

jmmikkelsen — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:08:17 -0000

Zsh and tab completion works for me and deals with the escaping just fine. As also noted, you can use the normal shell escaping rules manually; that should work with any shell, even bash!

I'm coming up to six months since my move to Mac; the first thing I did was set terminal up to start on login. There are many interesting commands on the Mac you don't find elsewhere. The most relevant is "open". Type "open /path/to/file" and you get the equivalent effect of double clicking the file in Finder.

Re: Sometimes the Mac OS Sucks

Norman Walsh — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:38:14 -0000

You need to either quote the filename: "this works", or escape the space: this\ works\ too.

As far as the semantics though, I don't think I agree with you. If I drag file "a" from somewhere onto file "a" somewhere else, the new replaces the old. Sounds like Finder does the same thing with folders, which strikes me as consistent. Not that I've ever used drag-and-drop to move a file in my life on any platform.

Re: Sometimes the Mac OS Sucks

craigburton — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:02:18 -0000

Excellent idea. Now I just need to figure out how to traverse and address the Mac filesystem in bash. So far, anything with a space in it is ignored.

Re: Sometimes the Mac OS Sucks

jmmikkelsen — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:33:01 -0000

Open terminal and use Unix. for example, cp works.