Command line stuff

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Wednesday 23 January 2008, Donn wrote:

> around the place. You want to move some files to another dir. You want
> *.jpg but not "blob.jpg". You also want a few pdfs, but not all of them.

I used to have something on DOS, and I think it was called "not."  The syntax 
was something like:

  not blob.jpg copy *.jpg c:\blah

The way it worked was to change the hidden attribute for files matching the 
one parameter passed to the not command, or something like that.  There's not 
quite a direct Linux equivalent of that, but you could mv foo .foo to hide 
it.

> This means quite a bit of planning (depending on the needs) and a bunch
> path tab completing, up arrow stuff, editing and so on.

Honestly, Donn, this scenario is one of the few times I would get out a 
graphical file manager.  It's good for moving a selective bit of this and a 
selective bit of that to a selective somewhere else.  Doing this from the 
command line sucks, and I say that as someone who currently has no graphical 
file browser windows open, and 10 Konsole tabs open.

I've never been one to use the likes of Xtree or Midnight Commander either, 
but it seems like Midnight Commander might fit this bill better than the 
plain ol' command line.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre