I switched 2 months ago from a windows machine to Mac and as propably everyone would say I will never go back. I was on PC my whole life before and looking back at that time I know think I made the switch too late but better now than never 
The only little thing which I don`t like is that there does not seem to be an easy (none terminal) way to copy a folder into a new folder and just merge the content. The only option seems to be to delete the target folder and replace it completely with new content. Well I haven`t really looked that much for a solution so if there is a handy trick please leave a comment.
Anyway this i one of the reasons I love AIR so much! It`s just so simple to create little utility apps that can make your life easier. It just took 10 min and now I have a little app that does just that merging folder content
You can select a target location and then drag all the files you want to copy into the app and it will tell you which files already exist and will be overwritten. You can then deselect the ones you don`t want to be overwritten or you just go on and merge the folders – replacing the existing files in the target location with the copied ones.
Again this might be a totally overkill app because I just can`t believe that there isn`t a hidden command to do just that on the Mac but anyway it was fun to build this…
[flashvideo filename=http://www.richapps.de/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/osxcopy.flv /]
Download it here. (Be care full and use on your own risk as it can overwrite files on your system! )
Source is included (right click the app)
There is a program called FileMerge that comes packaged with the rest of Apple’s official developer tools. The developer tools are a >200 MB installation last I checked, but they’re available for free with an Apple Developer account, which just takes a few minutes to sign up for, and it’s worth it just for FileMerge. It’s easily the best Diff program I’ve seen, and if there are no files with changes it works fine as a simple folder merger too.
Hey Benz,
There is no such thing as an overkill app
Nice work dude!
HOLY CRAP.
Thanks a bunch!
FYI:
You can’t drag and drop files from your hard drive into this… However, it was simple enough to work around this bug: all I did was move the files to the desktop and then I could do it…
Hi mate… ur apps have saved my day and days in the future if Apple doesnt solve the situation fast.. 😉
Anyway, i wanna ask you something… two things:
1st-How can i make the apps let me add more folders? I just add one and thats it…it would be cool if we could add more, like a batch or something..
2nd-As i needed to install/merge various folders in the same path, i noticed that i need to search for the destiny path everytime i want to merge it with other folder. Can’t it save the last position? and let me drag and drop again without having to choose the path again?
Don’t be intimidated…i loved ur apps 😀
Hi!
Very cool little tool,
I have a question though, if a file under the same name already exists in the destination, does it keep the newer one? Or just replaces it with the one from the source?
Also, the tabs do not expand past the width of the window, so you cannot see long file paths, so you can’t actually see the file names.
Also it doesn’t resize when dragged by the bottom corner.
Any ideas?
Thanks guys
Forgot to mention – this is on OSX 10.6.8