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Re: Odd Finder Behavior
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Re: Odd Finder Behavior


  • Subject: Re: Odd Finder Behavior
  • From: Christopher Nebel <email@hidden>
  • Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 11:28:06 -0800

On Dec 6, 2006, at 9:50 AM, Peter Waibel wrote:

Has anyone suggestion how to savely delete files (data and resource
fork) on a mounted volume without using finder scripting?

You can use rm.

I do use rm on my own files
but I'm still hesitating to use rm in scripts that are used by others.


The reason why I'm hesitating is that I do not understand what rm really does.

That's not unreasonable, because the answer to that question changed some in Tiger. These days, rm(1) deletes the file, including any sort of extended meta-data it has, regardless of the type of file system it's on. This used to not be the case -- file systems that don't support extended meta-data such as resource forks store the extended information as a sibling file [1], and rm(1) would only delete the primary one.


Therefore: if you can assume Tiger, then don't worry about it, it's all good. If not, then you probably don't have to worry about it, because most people only use HFS+ disks, for which the problem doesn't apply. (However, that depends some on who your customers are.)

Great news! I didn't know that the behavior of rm is improved in Tiger.
Thanks for the detailed answer, Chris.


But there is already the next question: Does the behavior of "mv" and "cp" have improved as well?

Yes; the entire BSD layer got an update in this respect. Even things like rsync(1) respect meta-data now.


Is it a good idea to use unix commands with "do script" for operating on files
or can we expect to get improved native AppleScript commands in the future?

For a variety of reasons, I can't comment on the future [1], but using "do shell script" is a reasonable solution for many tasks -- it has at least the virtue of working (with the pre-Tiger caveats above). That said, there are other solutions that also work, and depending on precisely what you're doing and how you're doing it, they may be superior to "do shell script" (where "superior" usually means "faster" and often "more readable", though the latter is subjective). You might try using System Events' Disk-Folder-File suite for some tasks.




--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering

[1] "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future." -- Yogi Berra

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 >Re: Odd Finder Behavior (From: Peter Waibel <email@hidden>)

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