"Move file" copies file instead

Questions & Suggestions
22

Hey Tom,

The shell doesn't escape spaces in output. It leaves them in all their glory:

ls -ldeO ~/'Dropbox/Public/Developers/SmallCubed Software'
drwxr-xr-x@ 4 chris  staff  - 136 Jan  6 18:34 /Users/me/Dropbox/Public/Developers/SmallCubed Software/

-Chris

1 Like
23

Hey Jack,

If a file is busy when you try to move it then it's not surprising that something would fail.

(I'm not saying definitively that this is what is happening though.)

You may as well try AppleScript.

set sourceDir to alias "Mercury:Users:myUserName:test_directory:Source_Directory:"
set destinationDir to alias "Mercury:Users:myUserName:test_directory:Destination_Directory:"

tell application "Finder"
   move sourceDir to destinationDir
end tell

-Chris

24

Thanks, you are right of course. I somehow had the first line with the dropped folder in my visual memory:

25

Hey Tom,

I've done stuff like that.  :blush:

Personally I hate escaped paths. I find them painful to read, so I quote them instead.

'/Users/myUser/test_directory/A Name with Many Spaces'

~/'test_directory/A Name with Many Spaces'

I find this much better than the leaning-toothpick method.

Shift-Drag will give you a non-escaped path in the Terminal.

I almost never drag and drop to the Terminal, since I have scripts to put POSIX Paths of selected items on the clipboard.

-Chris

26

But we don’t know if the OP is on Sierra or on a previous system.

@Tom @JMichaelTX Sorry, bad form on my part for not stating my OS. I experienced this on 10.11. I actually just upgraded to Sierra a couple of days ago for unrelated reasons. Right now I actually can't reproduce the issue. Could be an OS thing or could fluctuate based on Dropbox activity.

27

Thanks for the info. Out of curiosity, please report back when/if the problem returns with Sierra.

28

@Tom It does occur on Sierra.

1 Like
29

Hey Jack, have you seen this comment on the 19.3.11beta build?

“move to DB” probably refers to the DB contextual menu, but who knows…
So it may be worth to try that version. (You can always go back to the latest stable version.)

1 Like
30

Ooh, good to know. I’ll wait for the official release since Dropbox is mission-critical for me. :slight_smile: Thanks for the tip.