From owner-freebsd-questions  Sat May 12 11:14:11 2001
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Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 13:14:02 -0500
From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>
To: Francois Kritzinger <ffkrz@iafrica.com>
Cc: freeBSD Mailing List <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject: Re: COPY, CUT, PASTE (FILES)
Message-ID: <20010512131401.A26940@dan.emsphone.com>
References: <3AFCE758.63DE32E1@iafrica.com> <20010512023703.A24989@dan.emsphone.com> <3AFD167F.7480F4C6@iafrica.com>
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In the last episode (May 12), Francois Kritzinger said:
> No, for that you need to know exactly where you want to put the
> files.
> 
> In this case you know that you want to copy or move the files
> somewhere, you just dont know exactly where yet. Like in a file
> manager - when you right click a file, you can select "copy" or "cut"
> (the files' paths get written to a "clipboard") and then browse
> around till you find the dir you want to put the files. Then when you
> find the dir in which you want to put the files, you simply type (for
> example) "paste", and the files get copied or moved into the current
> dir.
> 
> Like a file manager.

You could always install the misc/mc port, which is an excellent
full-screen text-mode file manager; I use it quite a bit.

Or, if all you really need to do is remember the full pathnames of a
group of files for later use, you can try something like this zsh shell
function:

remember () { remember=() ; local i ; for i in $@ ; do files=($files `realpath $i`) ; done }

Then you can do things like

~$ cd /tmp
/tmp$ ls 
./                      makeZKfzhNjCmv          uthread.dump.882.0
../                     mysql.sock=             uthread.dump.882.1
/tmp$ remember uth*
/tmp$ echo $files
/tmp/uthread.dump.882.0 /tmp/uthread.dump.882.1
/tmp$ cd ~/logs
~/logs$ ls
./      ../
~/logs$ cp $files .
~/logs$ ls
./                      uthread.dump.882.0
../                     uthread.dump.882.1
~/logs$

The remember shell function simply takes its commandline arguments, calls
"realpath" on each one to create an absolute path, and stores the
results in a shell array $files.  Since the array consists of absolute
paths, you can cd wherever you want, and be confident that $files
always to refer to the right files.  So instead of "cut/copy" and
"paste" later, you use "remember" and "mv/cp/vi/lp/rm/whatever" later. 

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@emsphone.com

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