No Clobber Copy / Blog: Recent posts

Version 2.0.3 solves a few of the problems that made version 2.0.2 almost completely useless. For one, you can now copy files to and from directories, and you can even have directories in the list of SOURCES without there being a fatal error--they won't be copied, but at least you can now include them in the list of SOURCES and still get all of the other SOURCES that weren't directories copied. ... read more

Currently, No Clobber Copy is very limited in what it can do--it can only copy binary and regular files, at present, but I'm working on adding support for copying directories as well--symbolic link support will come next.

I've also noticed that nocp seems incapable of copying files to any great extent, which is not good--I've probably put more effort into nocp than any other project that I've ever worked on, and nocp is still far from being finished, much to my dismay. Upon closer inspection just a bit ago, I realized--to my horror--that the 2.0.x series seems to be even less functional than the 1.x.x series! I may abandon nocp if I can't figure this out, especially since I've discovered GNU copy's -b option.

Well, No Clobber Copy is still not operational yet, but I've made a TON of progress and I've been inching my way more and more towards getting nocp fully functional. The current devel version of No Clobber Copy (version 1.5c.1) uses SQLite to process, format, and maintain most of the data it uses--except for some internals, like what mode we're in and stuff like that that would only slow nocp down unnecessarily if we were to store it in an SQLite database. ... read more

I kind of dropped the ball when it came to making sure that everything worked on Windows and such... I've broken out virtualbox again, however, so it's all good--future releases will have all line-endings converted properly (if they weren't already) and PATH delimiters changed accordingly.

No worries. :)

From now on, I'll be releasing separate releases for the Mac (up until now, I've just been using the Linux release as the defacto release for Mac OS X, but I'm going to change that because Mac uses a different eol character than Linux--Mac uses CR; Linux uses LF) using a .tar.bz2 file format to distinguish it from the other releases. (I'd like to use the .dmg file format, but I'm still working on a way to create .dmg files--there are scripts out there that can do it, but I'd like to write my own since all of the scripts out there are written in bash, which makes me uncomfortable since the process of making a .dmg file seems to be a bit much for bash (the scripts feel like hack jobs, no offense, just my opinion... and believe me... I dislike saying degrading things about stuff other people make. (I'd like to write my little .dmg machine in TCL, or Ruby/C if TCL is too lightweight/not-the-right-language-for-the-job.)

Currently working on version 1.4, which will solve the problems with copying a SOURCE to an ambiguous DESTINATION such as a path like '../' or '..'.

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Presently, while the functionality for copying to a file or directory exists, the way nocp goes about copying SOURCES to DESTS is very problematic and so I'm in the process of revising a lot of the code in libs/cplibs.rb to make it more readable and more useful.

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In all previous releases (versions 1.3.1 and earlier), nocp only ever copies SOURCE to DEST if, and only if, ruby raises a Errno::ENOENT (that is, file does not exist) exception--this is part of the reason why nocp will not only avoid clobbering, but it is actually incapable of ever clobbering SOURCE to DEST. However, this setup is also a pain in the butt to work with--whenever I want to make any changes, I have to add more and more code to the try-catch (in ruby, the terms 'begin' and 'rescue' are used instead of 'try' and 'catch') statement(s). ... read more

Version 1.3.1

• cplibs.rb:
• (safeCopy): Fixed 'not-recursive' mode when used on directories. In the previous version, when users used the '-n' switch on a directory-source, Ruby would raise a Errno::EISDIR exception. Version 1.3.1 addresses this bug by omitting directories when the '-n' switch is used.

Documentation Changes for Version 1.3.1

I've also added an extremely small README that points the user to the bitbucket-wiki for No Clobber Copy. ... read more

FINALLY done. Here's the changelog for Version 1.3:

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Version 1.3

• nocp.py(-): rewrote nocp.py in Ruby as nocp.rb
• nocp.rb(+): added/ditto
• (*): args are now processed using Ruby's implementation of getoptlong.
• libs/help.rb(+): added libs/help.rb--contains the help text that is printed out when a user passes the '--help' switch to No Clobber Copy

... read more

Well, I was going to make a quick release of No Clobber Copy, but the current source code for No Clobber Copy is a real mess... so I'm going to rewrite it using the Ruby getopt library for arg handling and that'll probably cut down on a lot of the spaghetti code--plus No Clobber Copy doesn't even seem to work in its current state. It just keeps on complaining about not being able to stat SOURCE, even when the SOURCE file is right smacking there in front of it! ... read more

I'll hopefully be able to find some time to add the final touches to the 0.02b.2 release of No Clobber Copy--this will actually be the first real release that I will have made with No Clobber Copy, but that doesn't really matter--sometime tomorrow (Monday--06/31/2013).

I'm in the process of partially rewriting nocp in Ruby--python doesn't seem to have a module for copying files and preserving everything just like in GNU Coreutils cp

I know I haven't uploaded any files yet, but no worries, as soon as I get ruby rake working I'll upload a release of nocp.