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Recognise moved and renamed files automagically


Zandros

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I know this can be done, for example Papaya (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Lighthead Software) do this, iTunes do this, aliases do this and I'm pretty sure it's OS functionality.

In essence, µTorrent would recognise the file even if the user had moved it (on the same disk) or renamed it without having to do anything manually in µTorrent. Essentially working with the same restrictions as aliases. This would allow the user to do file manipulation in Finder instead of in µTorrent (in the future, that is).

I know this is a minor difference from what's already requested, but I believe the distinction is important.

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iTunes sure does know whenever I move the file on the same disk on Mac OS X (I tried it). It doesn't do this on Windows, though.

I'm not saying it should be solved by aliases, it was just an example on how it could work. I'm sure there are better ways to solve it. I do believe it's possible to achieve this functionality today, for the user, by using aliases as stand-ins for the files µTorrent are looking for, but I haven't tried it.

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Zandros - iTunes does not do this with me either... but OSX can definitely handle this, for example i watch a movie file in Quicktime and move the file while in use and even rename it, same with Preview (PDF Documents), i only think this is possible because the file is loaded in the cache (in Quicktime/Preview) - i only notice this because the filename does not change in Quicktime/Preview, and i highly doubt a several GB file (or whatever you use uTorrent for) can be done... although this is a wonderful suggestion as i stop seeding because of ridiculous filenames and i use Time Capsule as storage

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@Zandros: QuickTime and µTorrent's use case for dealing with files are vastly different.

This isn't feasible for torrents that are active/downloading. Its not a good idea to move data that is currently being written to to another place (writing data thats currently being written again leads to very bad problems).

Nor is it feasible for torrents that are active/uploading either — reading data from one place on the hard drive and then finding out that its gone isn't good. What if the data has been replaced by a different file? You don't want to send out bad data. And having to check if the file is the same *every time* is bad for performance.

@skate7129008: You can have time machine ignore a directory from backups: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/15622.html

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This isn't feasible for torrents that are active/downloading. Its not a good idea to move data that is currently being written to to another place (writing data thats currently being written again leads to very bad problems).

I'm not quite sure I follow here, but moving a file on the same disk doesn't involve writing any data. I did a little testing with the Mkvmerge GUI, muxing a music video, and moving the target file while doing so. No problems at all.

Nor is it feasible for torrents that are active/uploading either — reading data from one place on the hard drive and then finding out that its gone isn't good. What if the data has been replaced by a different file? You don't want to send out bad data. And having to check if the file is the same *every time* is bad for performance.

Exactly! This is what happens today when you move a file, µTorrent throws a "no such file or directory" error. This is not good. If µTorrent were aware that the file(s) had been moved (or rather, didn't care where the file is exactly), this wouldn't happen.

I think this is what is used for what I'm suggesting: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/LowLevelFileMgmt/Articles/FileManagementNSURL.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009059

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I'm not quite sure I follow here, but moving a file on the same disk doesn't involve writing any data. I did a little testing with the Mkvmerge GUI, muxing a music video, and moving the target file while doing so. No problems at all.

Moving implies that it can be moved across drives. Moving the file to a new drive and deleting the working file would cause problems.

Exactly! This is what happens today when you move a file, µTorrent throws a "no such file or directory" error. This is not good. If µTorrent were aware that the file(s) had been moved (or rather, didn't care where the file is exactly), this wouldn't happen.

And i'm saying that its not a good idea to move files when utorrent is working with them, period.

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  • 3 weeks later...

As far as I know, it's not possible to move files across drives in the Finder. It'll make a copy on the other drive, and then you have to delete the original file manually. From this procedure I think it's obvious and expected that µTorrent will lose the file location.

It's not so obvious that µTorrent should lose awareness of where the file is if I, on a whim, decide that my disk naming schema lacks style, and decide I want them to be named after Star Wars characters. It doesn't do this in Windows, as far as I know (where changing the drive letter probably would do something to the same effect).

All we are doing is rewriting metadata, the catalogue B-tree for mounted HFS+ partitions. µTorrent shouldn't need to be aware of this.

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All we are doing is rewriting metadata, the catalogue B-tree for mounted HFS+ partitions. µTorrent shouldn't need to be aware of this.

This is correct. Any application should not even check worry where the file is. OS should handle the movement of files. If you download a large file in Safari, for example, you can move the temporary file around (same HD though) if you want while it's being downloaded and it will not mess up anything.

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  • 1 month later...

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