From owner-freebsd-questions Sat May 12 12:15:25 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from core.usrlib.org (CC2-861.charter-stl.com [24.217.115.99]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 53BCD37B424 for ; Sat, 12 May 2001 12:15:23 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ajh3@core.usrlib.org) Received: by core.usrlib.org (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 025C7A814; Sat, 12 May 2001 14:14:19 -0500 (CDT) Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 14:14:19 -0500 From: Andrew Hesford To: Francois Kritzinger Cc: freeBSD Mailing List Subject: Re: COPY, CUT, PASTE (FILES) Message-ID: <20010512141419.A2406@core.usrlib.org> References: <3AFCE758.63DE32E1@iafrica.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <3AFCE758.63DE32E1@iafrica.com>; from ffkrz@iafrica.com on Sat, May 12, 2001 at 09:33:44AM +0200 X-Loop: Andrew Hesford Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sat, May 12, 2001 at 09:33:44AM +0200, Francois Kritzinger wrote: > Is there a way to copy, cut and then paste files from the shell? > E.g. "cut *.txt" and then "cd other_directory" and then "paste"... > > "Cut" and "Paste" are invalid metaphors for files. This is why no shell makes use of them. Windows has, once again, screwed things up. Think about it like this: You have two documents, S and D. Document S has a paragraph you want to append to document D. To do this, you take a pair of scissors, cut out the paragraph in S, and paste it at the end of D. This is a reasonable action, and is why the "cut and paste" metaphor was created: to move blocks of text from one document to another. Now think about this: You have one document A which is stored in filing cabinet FS. Next to FS you have another cabinet FD¸ which houses other documents. For whatever reason, you desire that document A reside in FD instead of FS. You do not grab the scissors, but instead pull the entire document out of FS and place it in FD. Scissors would do absolutely no good here. You don't cut and paste documents, you shift them around. If you want to move stuff around in similar fashion, do this: mv /orignal-location/file . cp /new-location-1/file . [...] cp /new-location-n/file . This is the one-step "cut and paste" operation you want, which is better than actual cut and paste, since that is a two-step operation. Remember that all the ridiculous quirks of Windows were abandoned when you started using FreeBSD. If you want them back, start using Windows again. -- Andrew Hesford ajh3@usrlib.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message