Command line copying and moving with GUI dialogs in case of identical file names?
 

KDE has tools such as kde-mv (recently also kdemv5) and kde-cp (likewise).

The interesting thing it offers is that not only there would be a prompt in case of overwriting, but it will bring the file manager GUI with file previews and info as well, for comparison, along with options such as "auto rename all", or "skip all".

But such functions, from command line or in the file manager themselves, are broken nowadays. From what I understand the problem is with "KIO" and it has only been solved in kio 15.20. Even Ubuntu's "unstable" is still 15.18, and the "stable" (Wily, I think it's the stable, at least) is only 15,15. So I assume it will take a while in order to have it working again...

https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kio.git&...99d9bdf7428fe0


Does anyone know of similar tool(s), accessible from command line? Thanks a lot.

find, diff, cp, mv, and/or invoke midnight commander?

There is also a search monkey that invokes file manager at your choice.

Well I'm not sure but I hope it helps. Good luck.

m.m.

@the dsc : You can add the -i switch to cp and mv. This will prompt you before overwriting your files.

Thanks, I know that. But cp/mv/ln alone don't tell me automatically how these files look/what they are/any property, I only know that they have the same file name. In some GUI file managers (or those "within-X cli" KDE tools) the prompt would bring a preview of such files along with other info such as their file size and date.

I'll see if I can use yad to make a pop-up dialog mimicking those applications. I was going to do a hack with misusing a SVG + imagemagick's display to fake a GUI, but that's beyond ridiculous, and apparently yad allows you to easily put images in windows generated through scripts. I don't know if it allows two images side by side, but I think concatenated thumbnails are an acceptable hack. I seriously need to learn some basic real GUI programming.