Moving folders with content

[Hans Mulder]

On 15/09/12 10:00:16, Nobody wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Sep 2012 04:36:00 +0000, jyoung79 wrote:
> 
>> I am working in both OS X Snow Leopard and Lion (10.6.8 and 10.7.4).  
>> I'm simply wanting to move folders (with their content) from various 
>> servers to the hard drive and then back to different directories on the 
>> servers.
>>
>> I want to be careful not to remove any metadata or resource forks from 
>> the files in the directories.  I did a bit of researching on shutil, and 
>> looks like it is similar to using "cp -p" and copystat(), which I believe 
>> will keep the resource fork, etc.
> 
> I don't think so. The shutil documentation says:
> 
> 	Warning
> 
> 	Even the higher-level file copying functions (copy(), copy2()) can’t
> 	copy all file metadata.
> 
> 	On POSIX platforms, this means that file owner and group are lost as well
> 	as ACLs. On Mac OS, the resource fork and other metadata are not used.
> 	This means that resources will be lost and file type and creator codes
> 	will not be correct. On Windows, file owners, ACLs and alternate data
> 	streams are not copied.
> 
> The macostools module has functions which can copy the resource fork, but
> they aren't available in 64-bit builds and have been removed in Python 3.0.

You may want to use the subprocess module to run 'ditto'.  If
the destination folder does not exist, then ditto will copy MacOS
specific aspects such as resource forks, ACLs and HFS meta-data.

If the destination already exists, then ditto will copy file
contents, but not modify mode, ownership or ACLs of existing
folders inside the destination folder.

See the manual page for details.


Hope this helps,

-- HansM