Jan Steinman wrote:
>> From: Dan Mitchell <danmitchell@xxxxxxxx>
>>
>> 1. Using Finder, is there any way to delete a file without sending
>> it to
>> the trash can that doesn't involve using 'rm' from a command window?
>
> Not that I'm aware of. Is this a big problem?
Not really -- as I said in another email, I'm moving video files onto
the Mac to watch them, and then I want to delete them to keep the hard
drive clean. I don't want to move them into the trash can and then empty
it, because there's a bunch of other (small) files in there that may
want to be restored, and the Mac doesn't have a way to remove single
files from the trash.
I suppose the intended approach (ie, following the UI and not sneaking
around with prompts) is that I ignore this until the hard drive fills
up, and then move all the other files out into a temporary directory,
empty the trash, and then move them back in there.
Well, to be fair, probably I should go through the trash and decide
for once and for all which files _can_ be permanently deleted, but this
is my wife's laptop and I don't want to remove anything that she might
want to restore -- she's got a bunch of old documents and whatnot in
there, none of which are big, whereas videos take up space much faster.
> You don't have to do "kill -9". Do "force quit" from the Finder, and
> if that doesn't work the first time, do it again. The first one does
> a "kill -HUP" and the second one does a "kill -KILL" and will then
> update itself.
That's why I'm asking -- if "force quit" worked, I wouldn't have to be
using command prompts to get rid of processes. VLC, while it may be the
only thing I've found that'll deal with non-Apple codecs, seems to get
locked up annoyingly often -- while I can find and kill it with 'ps',
the UI layer then doesn't seem to know that it's gone. (there's a
similar problem occasionally where the set of icons on the desktop
doesn't refresh properly -- if a file gets locked somehow by a dead
process and I have to use 'rm' to clean it up, I can also end up stuck
needing to restart to convince Finder that the file isn't there any
more; otherwise, I have a phantom icon left behind on the desktop that I
can't do anything with. As with deleting, not a critical problem, but an
annoying one).
>> 4. Is there any recommended way to improve stability when using USB
>> storage? If I'm trying to copy a file and it locks up mid-way for
>> whatever reason, I'm basically stuck...
>
> See above. It sounds like your USB storage device has FAT-rot. Re-
> format it. Not the Mac's fault that it has to deal with Windows file
> system formats. Not even the Mac's fault if it deals with Windows
> file system formats less gracefully than Windows does!
That's a good point -- thanks; I've seen other USB storage devices
have issues until reformatted, certainly.
I'm still curious as to why the Mac's FAT32 handler is so fragile that
it can require a total powerdown to get things working again, but I
suppose Apple's plan is that Mac users only ever use Macs and so it's
not particularly important to make interoperability with other things
work properly. (thus the problems with connecting to windows shared
printers, using wireless access points (non-Airport ones, at any rate),
etc -- if I was in an all-Apple world, I'm sure things would be much nicer).
>> 5. How do I restart Finder?
>
> You can always restart it from the Dock, or double-click /System/
> Library/Core Services/Finder .
The problem is this happens when Finder is dead (ie no icons on the
desktop at all, the main top left icon is dead) but the system doesn't
know it's dead (ie I can't launch/kill it from the dock, and Force Quit
still thinks it's there) that this problem happens -- so I don't have
finder to use to launch another finder process.. If that's where it
lives, though, I can get to it with a command window; thanks!
>> 6. Copying from DVD-roms, how do I convince Finder to copy files
>> sequentially rather than in parallel?
>
> Never heard of that. You haven't been loading up on third-party
> utilities, have you? (A lot of Windows-converts think they have to do
> that, and end up screwing up their system. :-)
Nope -- this is my wife's Mac, and it has OSX, Office, VLC, and that's
all. My Mac at work has a bunch of extra stuff on there, but that's
because I'm doing development on there so I've accumulated things over
time. (though even there it's just a CVS client, some icon tools, XCode,
no system-level things)
And, I agree, it sounds completely insane to me as well.
Oh, one other thing, now that you mention it -- with a stock install
of OSX, can I do pixel-level (or _any_) image editing? I can't find any
sort of equivalent to Paint on there, which surprises me given that
Macpaint was the thing they'd have on demo Macs back in the olden days.
I could install the GIMP but I seem to remember that involves
darwinports and whatnot, which I'd rather steer clear of on a Mac that's
not mine. I'm assuming I just haven't found the right thing, because I
can't imagine there isn't something to do basic image editing, given
there's garageband and the dvd maker. There's Preview, but that doesn't
let me change things unless I'm missing something, and when I hunted
around elsewhere, there doesn't seem to be anything free out there.
-- dan
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