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132 votes

Add merge folder feature (ala Windows) declined

This is a very difficult feature to add - I won't say it's impossible, but at the very least it's a huge amount of work. The problem is that Path Finder doesn't actually handle any file operations on its own: at it's core it simply asks the OS to do something and then displays the results.

Merging is not part of the current OS file system, so we'd have to subvert the OS's file operations to add this feature, which is a huge amount of work. I know you can do this via the command line using cp but again, simply writing a GUI for a command line feature isn't that straightforward.

I've marked this as declined mostly so it's understood that we don't foresee this being added to Path Finder in the nearish future, but it's definitely something on our "someday" list to at least investigate.

- neilio
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  1. Comments
  1. 1 Default-avatar

    Teracopy for windows has an excellent implementation of this feature. Click-n-drag can move a source folder's contents into a target folder with the same name without destroying the contents of that folder. Perhaps this model could help Path Finder in the future.

  2. 3 Default-avatar

    Windows, Unix, Linux and the Mac terminal mv & ditto all have the wanted behaviour why be different in the Mac Graphical file browser, it does not make sense. Linux gave users the option to change anything they wanted and know one chose to make it work like the default finder action.

  3. 3 Default-avatar

    Note: just to clarify for those that will nitpick... the /music/newmusicfiles.mp3 is assuming your copying a complex directory structure /music/{variousnewartistfolders}/{variousnewartistalbums}/{songs} by copy just the root /music folder and assuming the computer will do the hard work.

  4. 3 Default-avatar

    The software should always err on the side of *not* destroying data when intention is not clear. In the modern work flow, merging is many times more likely to be the desired behavior, particularly with the volume of photos, music, movies, documents, spread across 500GB multi level drives. Copy /music/newmusicfiles.mp3 to /music and congrats, your entire collection is gone. Alternatives...unix.

  5. 3 Default-avatar

    Meanwhile, this is being discussed in the forum at http://www.cocoatech.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1705

  6. 3 Default-avatar

    A must! I can't believe I have to use the command line to do something so simple ;-)

    This is one of the things I actually miss from using Windows Explorer.

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