Re: Safe asynchronous file copies

FROM : Dave Hersey
DATE : Sat Nov 17 23:04:37 2007

On Nov 17, 2007, at 3:25 PM, Pierre Bernard wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I am looking for a way to safely copy or move several files to a 
> single destination folder.
>
> - Safe: I want it to check bevor overwriting existing files
> - Smart: If I copy two files of the same name at the same time, I 
> want both files to exist at destination with their names suffixed 
> by a counter
> - Asynchronous: No beachball, but a progress bar
> - Support resource forks, attributes, ...
> - Bonus: authentication if needed
>
> I see no Cocoa API living up to the task. NSFileManager/NSWorkspace 
> only provide the building blocks. One would need to pour in quite 
> some effort to wrap them with the above features.
>
> The Finder does all this and has an interface familiar to the user. 
> AppleScript might be the way to go. My AppleScript knowledge is 
> very limited. I am not actually sure the Finder exposes these 
> features to AppleScript. I don't even know how to pass a list of 
> file paths to Apple Script.
>
> Is there a Carbon API to do this?
>
> Has anyone else been down this road?
>
> Pierre


There's no single API for doing what you're asking; you need to write 
some code.

It's not particularly difficult, but you'll want to do some research 
into available Cocoa frameworks, Carbon APIs and even system tools 
like ditto. It's hard to say which would work best for your needs--
you may even want to use more than one. I believe that some of this 
has been discussed on the Apple lists before, such as how to 
determine progress during a file copy.

- d