I am not able to access .DS_store files in High Sierra. Do APFS store meta data of a folder somewhere else, How to read and modify meta data of a folder in APFS.
You should never be reading and writing .DS_store files, they are private to the Finder. Depending on the metadata you are trying to read/write you might use NSFileManager, NSURL, the BSD/Posix functions covered in sections 2 & 3 of the Unix manual (the man) command, AppleScripting the Finder, etc. Time for some reading!
If you don't find your answer ask a new question, show what you've tried (or worked pre-APFS), what you've read, what exact metadata you're trying to read/write, etc. and someone will undoubtedly help you out.
Related
I was just reading this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustered_file_system#Distributed_file_systems
The definition of a DFS seems to exactly describe Dropbox to me but it isn't in the list of examples, which of course it would be if it was one I think.
So what is different about Dropbox which makes it not fall into this category?
Usually, when talking about distributed file-systems, you expect properties that Dropbox doesn't support. For example, if you and I share a folder, I can create a file called "work.txt" in it and you can create a file "work.txt" in it, and if we do it fast enough (or when we're not syncing with dropbox) we'll have conflicting copies of the same file.
A similar example would be if we both edit the same file concurrently - we'll have conflicting copies, which is something a distributed file system should prevent. In the link you refer to, this is called "Concurrency transparency; all clients have the same view of the state of the file system".
Another example of a property dropbox doesn't support: if my computer fails (e.g., my hard-drive is corrupted) I might lose data that wasn't uploaded to Dropbox. There is a small window in which I think my data was written to the local disk, but if my computer fails, I lose that data.
Lastly, I'm not sure how Dropbox will operate with file locks. For example, MS office takes locks on .doc files, to ensure no one else is working on them at the same time. I don't think Dropbox supports this feature.
I've written a blog post about some of complexities of implementing a distributed file-system, you might find it helpful as well.
I need to find the size of a directory (and its sub-directories). I can do this by iterating through the directory tree and summing up the file sizes etc. There are many examples on the internet but it's a somewhat tedious and slow process, particularly when looking at exceptionally large directory structures.
I notice that Apple's Finder application can instantly display a directory size for any given directory. This implies that the operating system is maintaining this information in real time. However, I've been unable to determine how to access this information. Does anyone know where this information is stored and if it can be retrieved by an Objective-C application?
IIRC Finder iterates too. In the old days, it used to use FSGetCatalogInfo (an old File Manager call) to do this quickly. I think there's a newer POSIX call for that these days that's the fastest, lowest-level API for this, especially if you're not interested in all the other info besides the size and really need blazing speed over easily maintainable code.
That said, if it is cached somewhere in a publicly accessible place, it is probably Spotlight. Have you checked whether the spotlight info for a folder includes its size?
PS - One important thing to remember when determining the size of a file: Mac files can have two "forks", the data fork, and the resource fork (where e.g. Finder keeps the info if you override a particular file to open with another application than the default for its file type, and custom icons assigned to files). So make sure you add up both forks' sizes, or your measurements will be off.
I recently recovered a 1.5TB external HDD that crashed. The program I used to recover the files was Active Undelete Enterprise, it's excellent. When the files were successfully recovered they were all saved with a .efs extension so files looked like mydocument.docx.efs. At first I thought they were encrypted and needed to be decrypted, I spent 10 mins on it and realized I just need to remove the .efs from the entire filename and the mydocument.docx works perfectly. Problem is now I have over 55,000 files within hundreds of folders where I need to simply remove the .efs after each file. Does anyone know how to do this?
From a command prompt window, navigate to the top level directory where these files reside.
Type the command
DIR /S/B >>filelist.txt
This command will give you a bare format file listing of the current directory plus all nested subdirectories without any extraneous information. The list will be contained in the text file named "filelist.txt" or whatever else you choose to call it. I would then use this text file in a text editor to convert every line of text from, for example,
C:\Users\dlucas\.gimp-2.8\mathmap\file1.png.efs
to
rename c:\Users\dlucas\.gimp-2.8\mathmap\file1.png.efs file1.png
to give a simple example of a file that I just found on my system using this method.
You will need to use a text editor with a columnar editing capability since you have to modify som many files. Old programmer's editors such as CodeWright made this really simple while modern editors such as Eclipse or Notepad++ make this a little more difficult and may require a columnar editing plugin, depending on version. You basically have to make a columnar copy of all of the text in the file, and then paste the copy off to the far right - far enough that a second column of filenames and paths won't overwrite any of the existing file names and paths. You can then use columnar editing features to select and delete the path names of the text in the 2nd column since the rename command requires that the 2nd argument be simply the base filename and extension without the path information. You can use the columnar editing features to prepend every line with "RENAME ". If you attempt to do this without columnar editing features, you will find it slow going!
An alternate way to do this is to use a command formed from a "regular expression" to create the rename command. If you are not familiar with "regular expressions", ask a programmer friend as this is not an easy topic to learn from scratch. If you are familiar with regular expressions, this is probably the simplest way to perform this task. I haven't used them in many years and no longer recall the exact syntax to use or I would tell you myself.
Regardless of what kind of editor you use, the goal is to turn this ASCII file list of paths and filenames into a batch file (simply rename file1.txt to file1.bat when you are finished editing). You can then run the batch file by typing file1.bat at a command prompt.
I have just run into this same problem myself using the same really wonderful tool that you used. I am writing this while waiting for the undelete program to finish. That it restores files with this extra extension seems very anti-intuitive so I will look for an option to make it not do this when it finishes. If I find one, I will post a new answer here that is more specific to this tool. Otherwise, I am going to have rename all kazillion files just as you had to.
You experienced this problem because the disk that you recovered your files to "does not support encryption", according to the Active# UNDELETE documentation. The documentation offers no further explanation of what kind of disks support encryption, etc.
They offer a Decrypt command that restores the file's proper names as a post processing step. Unfortunately, this requires that you "include" each and every file to be decrypted, with no support for wildcards and parsing subdirectories so that is a non-starter, in my opinion given that both of us have hundreds of thousands of files to be renamed.
I did find that by selecting a normal fixed (non-removable) hard drive as the destination of the recovery effort, that the resulting files do not end up encrypted (i.e., they are recovered with the proper file name and extension). I originally chose a large USB based flash drive and the files were stored in their "encrypted" state (not really encrypted, but possibly potentially so and thus they give the .efs extension). Of course, this meant that I had to run the command all over again after switching to a regular hard drive (takes about 16 hours to recover 80GB worth of files due to presence of many sector CRC errors).
I know there is NSDesktopDirectory that will get me the path to current user desktop directory, but where is this path value written and is there a way to change it from my cocoa application I cannot find out.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Additional explanation: in Snow Leopard when I rename Desktop folder to anything whatsoever, the content of this folder still shows on desktop, so I guess OS keeps track about that folder name and locations changes and keep it as desktop folder. Does anyone know how it does that?
One way you could do this is by storing whole set of files from the user's desktop (including .DS_Store, which has positional/spatial information) into a folder in your ~/Library/Application Support/ folder, then moving other files on the ~/Desktop? This should effectively "replace" the user's desktop.
[Posted as an answer as suggested above]
I spent about 40 minutes researching this out of curiosity. Google is unhelpful in this particular scenario so I poked around my ~/Library folder. The path isn't stored anywhere there. I then dug around with command-line-fu to check flags and any other metadata I could find. Nothing helpful.
I think this is a built-in thing that uses file system references as opposed to hard-coded file paths (which is why its "Desktop" designation survives renaming). If you delete it, it creates a new one and stores the ref to that one. You'll not be able to swap it around.
I think Phil's comment is probably your best bet: move the contents of the folder rather than the folder itself. Here's my take on it:
~/Desktop/.myDesktop1 ... ~/Desktop/.myDesktop2 ... ~/Desktop/.myDesktop3
Perhaps even: ~/Desktop/.myappdesktops/1 ~/Desktop/.myappdesktops/2 ~/Desktop/.myappdesktops/3
If you move stuff into a dot-folder, it'll remain hidden but there. Active stuff stays in ~/Desktop as normal but each of your conceptual "Desktops" gets stored in a dot-file so it stays hidden.
Caveat: Time Machine. :-) Regardless of your approach, swapping out "sets" of files will potentially wreak havoc with any backup solution.
So, to answer my own question: there is no way to change the desktop path in Snow Leopard or Lion (although you van read it). The only way to switch dasktops is moving the contents itself which can be done with a set of AppleScripts to some degree :(.
The other way is this app here :)):
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/projectdesktops/id499870251?ls=1&mt=12
I've always backed up all my source codes into .zip files and put it in my usb drive and uploaded to my server somewhere else in the world.. however I only do this once every two weeks, because my project is a little big.
Right now my project directories (I have a few of them) contains a hierarchy of c++ files in it, and interspersed with them are .o files which would make backing up take a while if not ignored.
What tools exist out there that will let me just back things up efficiently, conveniently and lets me specify which file types to back up (lots of .png, .jpg and some text types in there), and which directories to be ignored (esp. the build dirs)?
Or is there any ingenious methods out there that people use?
Though not a backup solution, a version control manager on a remote server responds to most of your needs:
only changes are saved, not the whole project
you can filter out what you don't want to save
Moreover, you can create archives of your repository for true backup purposes.
If you want to learn about version control, take a look at Eric Sink's weblog, in particular:
Source Control HOWTO, for the basics of source control
Mercurial, Subversion, and Wesley Snipes for the links to articles on distributed version control systems
I use dropbox, im a single developer developing software. In some projects I work out from my dropbox which means they synchronize every time i build. Other projects i copy the source code there my self. But most important is that i can work on all my computers with dropbox installed on them... works for my simple needs
Agree with mouviciel. If you do not want that, consider rsync or unison to efficiently keep an up-to-date copy, be it on the same or a different machine.