Introducing the Merge To Finder plugin.

I was recently reading Steve Streeting’s (aka Sinbad) blog and he resurfaced a valid point about OS X’s Finder that had long annoyed me as well. In summary when you copy a folder and hit replace in Finder, it does not merge the contents of the folder, it removes the old folder and puts in the new one. This allows for you the user to lose all your data in the destination folder, when maybe all you wanted was to replace some of the files within.

I’ve always solved this problem on the terminal with rsync -r, and it has served me well. Then I decided I was tired of resorting to the terminal every time I needed to copy some files. This leads to the Merge To Automator workflow.

Merge To simply takes the selected items in finder, asks you where you would like to merge those items to via a folder selection dialog, then runs rsync -r [files and folders from finder] [output directory from dialog].

I like my workflow installed into the ctrl + click or secondary click menu of Finder, thus making it a Finder plugin. If you too would like this option, download the workflow and open it with Automator, then select File -> Save As Plug-In… Next, give it a name, “Merge To” is nice, and select Finder from the drop down. Finally, click save. You could also just copy the file to ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder/. If you decide you ever want to remove the plugin, then just delete the file at that same path.

Download: MergeToFinderPlugin.zip - 48 KB

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You’re currently reading “Introducing the Merge To Finder plugin.,” an entry on Tricky Fly Blog

Published:: 02.16.08 / 1pm

Category:: Mac OS X

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About

My name is Justin Walsh. I am a recent graduate of the University of Advancing Technology, and majored in Software Engineering.

I am currently working with MegaDotNet on several software projects. These projects range from web applications using Ruby on Rails, to 3D Graphics Simulations developed in C++.

In my spare time I also work on Ogre3D, an open source graphics engine. I am currently the Macintosh Maintainer and my contributions include universal binary support, bundle-able frameworks for OS X, the Mac SDK, and integrating Cocoa and Carbon platform support into the Macintosh port of Ogre.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions, suggestions, or just want to say hello.

Stan 03.11.08 / 7am

Awesome! Thanks for writing this, it’s extremely helpful!

The Mac Trashbin: « You Got your Science in my Anthropology 03.26.08 / 12am

[…] And to all the Mac users out there: all the other OS’s do merge, or will at least give the option for it. I’d at *least* like Finder to present this choice, especially since the Merge operation is a lot harder for a user to replicate on their own, than a Replace. By the way, it’s not perfect, but you can reclaim some of your lost Merge with MergetoFinder applescript […]

Alan Bristow 03.26.08 / 9pm

Thanks Justin. I am still amazed that the default behaviour in Windows seems _right_ to me and in OS X it seems wrong…

Your script is a brilliant solution - cheers, -Alan.

c 03.29.08 / 8am

Great idea, but is it me or does the script not work on path names that have spaces in them? I am on 10.5.

thanks,

Justin Walsh 03.29.08 / 12pm

Updated and fixed.

Looks like I was forgetting to escape the output path.

Ryan 04.15.08 / 7am

I wish this was a key modifier option, like copy/move. And I also find it strange that it replaces rather than merging. Though that is what the equivalent shell command would do I guess.

Ryan 04.15.08 / 9am

File doesn’t exist.

Justin Walsh 04.15.08 / 9am

Oops. I am in the process of migrating this blog and all files to a new server. The file is back up.

As to replacing rather than merging, this is where the word replace becomes a bit ambiguous. File by file it will replace that file with the file from the previous location, but on a directory it will merge the content that does not exist into the new location as well as replace any existing files.

Ryan 04.17.08 / 3am

Great thanks. What I really want after considering it… is for the Copy/Replace dialog in OSX to have a “Replace”, “Merge” and “Cancel” button. We can dream. It’s always bugged me the OSX kills the entire folder. I’ve never ever wanted it to work this way when copying files.

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Introducing the Merge To Finder plugin.

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