Re: First timer: Finder Copy vs. cp
Re: First timer: Finder Copy vs. cp
- Subject: Re: First timer: Finder Copy vs. cp
- From: Terry Lambert <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 15:50:54 -0700
On Aug 10, 2006, at 3:20 PM, Dan Shoop wrote:
At 1:03 PM -0700 8/10/06, Terry Lambert wrote:
On Aug 9, 2006, at 4:16 PM, Jeffrey Ellis wrote:
Hi, Terry--
Wow... I saw a list of everything cp does, and you're right. It
looks like
it does everything.
Okay, so I guess this is my next question. If cp does everything,
why would
anyone use ditto? I always thought that was used because of it's
ability to
copy resource forks.
Personally, I don't use ditto... I expect it's a matter of personal
preference, and what you're used to using.
Ideally it should be a matter of choosing the tool (or combination
of tools) that copy the metadata you're interested in rather than
choosing one or another for religious reasons and just hoping/
assuming it copies what you need.
Unfortunatley there seems to be a lack of understanding by users,
sysadmins and even Apple engineering as to what tools copy what
metatdata. And then there's the philosophical issue as to what each
tool /should/ be copying. While it's understandable, from a
philosophical standpoint, that if you copy a file it might be
considered a new entity and shouldn't maintain, say ACLs, creation
dates, Finder Attributes and other metadata are arguably expected by
most Mac users.
I like one tool, with option flags; encoding the options in the name
of the tool (;^)) doesn't work for me.
This is the first time I've heard anything about someone wanting the
create time copied; to me, it's always been not useful for anything,
but I have to admit, I tend to come at it from the direction of POSIX,
and since utime() and stat() don't have it unless it's mapped to one
of the stat fields by something that the FS has, and the FS doesn't
natively support (create time vs. metadata update time on MSDOSFS, for
instance), it's never bothered me to not have it preserved.
Like I said before: if it's a legitimate bug, it should be fixed; if
it's not done because you should have to be root to get the FS to lie
to the user (a create time is NOT like any other time that you could
set), it's not a bug.
I didn't get specific because I'm unwilling right now to do the work
to test whether it's preserved if the command line cp is done by root
instead of an ordinary user (too busy getting things together for my
talk on DTrace tommorrow morning).
-- Terry
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