[lug] File replace thought

[Lori Reed]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 08:18:39PM -0600, Andrew Diederich wrote:
>> What I realized is that what I /really/ want to know, is "are the
>> files different?"  Does KDE or Gnome do something similar, or with an
>> embedded diff call?  The next time someone on the list is designing a
> 
> Have you submitted this feature request to KDE or one of the other desktop
> environments or file-managers?  If not, you should.  I don't use drag and
> drop file management, but I think this is a really good idea.

I really don't think you'd want this, since it more than doubles the 
execution time to copy a file. And if you happen to have two files with 
the same name, size, and time stamp, but are in fact different, the 
software will still need user input as to what to do with the file being 
copied.

I considered this problem over 20 years ago and concluded that same 
name, same date, and same size equals same file. I haven't, to my 
knowledge, been stung yet.

And most of the time, thanks to dumb-assed software like ftp, browser 
downloads, and the cp option "-p" being not the default, same name and 
same size almost always equals same file.

As always, ymmv.

Lori