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> Your 'cp' example is good - how do you fix it if your current user doesn't have write permission to the location you're trying to copy to, or if the disk is
by oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
> Your 'cp' example is good - how do you fix it if your current user doesn't have write permission to the location you're trying to copy to, or if the disk is full, or if it's a volume that worked last time but it's not mounted now, or any one of many hundreds of reasons why a file can't be copied.
All of those problems could also occur with the GUI approach, and I'm not sure the error messages would allow a novice to fix the problem any better than on the command line.
- onion2k 4y agoThey don't. In a GUI a directory you don't have permission to write to is greyed out, or shows a "no entry" cursor when you drag something to it. An unmounted volume just isn't shown in the first place. A full disk shows an error saying how much space is needed, or asks you to free up space.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago> In a GUI a directory you don't have permission to write to is greyed out, or shows a "no entry" cursor when you drag something to it. Neither happens on macOS. Instead, I can drag the file as usual, but then I'm shown a dialog which asks me to login. It doesn't do a brilliant job of explaining the problem, but it's probably better on balance than the command line's "Permission denied". > An unmounted volume just isn't shown in the first place. Is this significantly different from the volume not being listed under /Volumes (again, this is where it turns up on macOS)? I think I almost always use tab-completion with that directory anyway because volumes rarely have reasonable names. > A full disk shows an error saying how much space is needed, or asks you to free up space. I'd be surprised if the command-line error wasn't similar, tbh.