I'd like to make a customized file manager using Ruby, but I don't want to reinvent too many wheels. Is there an existing file manager with an open API that could be accessed from Ruby? Or, is there a toolkit or framework available to make my own file manager?
What do you mean by a file manager? Command line or GUI based? Do you need it to be full featured, or are you just trying to do a file selection window, or something like that?
If you'd like a GUI based one - check your OS. There's probably hooks for manipulating the OS's GUI file manager. They may not be offered natively in Ruby, but more than likely they're available in C. You can wrap the hooks in a ruby extension, and then do what you want.
If you'd like a command line like one - check out FileUtils. It gives you the hooks you need to find out the directory contents, move, copy, or rename files, and pretty much anything else you want to do.
Related
I've been finding all kinds of Shell Interfaces via COM that help prevent reinventing the wheel when you have a Windows only application. One thing I haven't found is something that will put up standard messages like the question to overwrite an existing file (where it also shows the source and target file with icons, dates and such). Does something exists for that (outside of MFC/.NET)?
TIA!!
My friends are losing points in their computer science classes because their submission graders decompress and read zip files, which are obfuscated by a bunch of Apple metadata crap generated from zipping a file through the right-click contextual menu in Finder.
I've written a bash script to zip only unhidden files from a specific directory, and I've added a contextual menu service through Automator so this script can be run from right clicking a file.
The problem is I don't want to manually copy over all this stuff and make Automations on each computer my friends use. I'd like to leverage make or some similar utility to make an executable that will add the bash file and automator menu service to any computer the executable is opened from.
I'm lightly familiar with make (more familiar with rake), but I can't find out how to package the automator service and install it on their machine through an executable.
You'll want to package your automator application and script(s) into an Installer Package (.pkg). The best way to achieve this is to understand some general concepts, the commands to build one, and by checking out some tutorials or other relevant information.
I recommend for creating your first Installer Package using a utility
such as Packages (open-source and free), which has excellent
documentation, and is less complicated than using the command
line tools. Basically it puts a nice gui around the Apple tools which
are somewhat nonintutive by themselves.
Building Installer Packages is not the easiest thing to do your first time, and it might take a bit of patience to finally get it right. Once you've successfully created one you should have a good grasp on what is involved in putting them together along with the concept behind it all. At the very least, this information hopefully points you in the right direction regarding your question, and/or gives you a better idea of how to accomplish what you want to do.
I would like to create an installer of my program.
However because the installation is quite complicated, I need something more advanced than installshield limited edition.
I have to run another installer from my current one. It doesn't matter if the user press "cancel" or installs the program, I just need to run it.
I have to install a directory structure on user computer which has a lot of files, that's why i'm going mad with wix: 100 files and I should write all of them with my hands in that xml file? Are we mad?
I have to install files from point 2 into a registry key. That's why I was using wix
I played with nsis long time ago and I liked it, but the language is not so nice.
Wix has "similar" problem. I would love using something like C# and things like that otherwise I'll stick with wix but I need a way to add files faster to xml file, can't add 100 files manually.
Any suggestion?
You can give Advanced Installer a try. It has folder synchronization, which means it can batch add contents of folders, with the possibility to filter out certain file name patterns, for example you'd want to filter *.pdb files and add all the rest to the project automatically.
I use it myself and never had a problem.
Wix Heat can generate the wxs source files for you.
You should look at InnoSetup. It has an IDE available that allows drag and drop of files (and multiple select in a file selection dialog), can launch other applications (including additional setup files), create and modify registry settings, and supports pretty complex scripting if needed. It's pretty easy to use, and the documentation is pretty good. It comes with pretty comprehensive sample installations, too.
The installation scripts are created by the IDE and then compiled into an installer, so the script source is editable by hand if needed. It's also not XML, but more like an INI file, so it's a little easier to work with manually as well.
Best of all it's free, and so is the IDE.
I would go back to using NSIS, if you use the HMNSIS editor http://hmne.sourceforge.net/ to write your scripts you can use the Wizard mode to make a list of the files and directory structure you will use in your installer.
Running other installers and registry settings are also easily done with NSIS.
What I need is a directory which the user can handle as a single file in the Windows explorer. Does something like this exist? If not, what comes closest?
The closest thing is probably Alternate Data Streams, although those are more akin to MacOS Named Forks than Bundles.
There are also some special cases, for example if you save a website with Internet Explorer you get an HTML file and a folder which are linked together.
Depends on your particular needs. As mentioned above, named streams are possible (on NTFS), however you should notice that not all applications copy files with named streams correctly. In some scenarios regular ZIP archives can work (Explorer shows them as folders). If you are doing software development, there exist libraries that let you store many files in one container file (eg. SolFS).
I think you can create a folder with an extension, e.g. Myfolder.bundle, then you can associate that extension with a custom icon. So it looks like a bundle as far as the end user is concerned.
I would like to upload documents to GoogleDocs every time the OS hears that a file was added/dragged/saved in a designated folder, just the way DropBox uploads a file when you save it in the DropBox folder.
What would this take in Ruby, what are the parts?
How do you listen for when a File is Saved?
How do you listen for when a File is added to a Folder?
I understand how to use the GoogleDocs API and upload things once I get these events, but I'm not sure how this would work.
Update
While I still don't know how to check if a file is added to a directory, listening for when a file is saved is now dirt simple, thanks to Guard for ruby.
If I were faced with this, I would use something like git or bzr to handle the version checking and just call add then commit from your script and monitor which files have changed (and therefore need to be uploaded).
This adds the benefit of full version control over files and it's mostly cross platform (if you include binaries for each platform).
Note this doesn't handle your listening problem, just what you do when you know something has changed. You could schedule the task (via various routes) but I still like the idea of a proper VCS under the hood.
I just found this: http://www.codeforpeople.com/lib/ruby/dirwatch/
You'd need to read over it as I can't vouch for its efficiency or reliability. It appears to use SQLite, so it might be better just to manually check once every 10 seconds (or something along those lines).
Ruby doesn't include a built-in way to "listen" for updates to files. If you want to stick to pure Ruby, your best bet would be to perform the upload on a fixed schedule (say every 5 minutes) regardless of when the file is saved.
If this isn't an acceptable alternative, you could try writing the app (or at least certain parts of it) in Java, which does support this type of thing. Take a look at JRuby for integrating the Ruby and Java portions of your app.
Here is a pure ruby gem:
http://github.com/TwP/directory_watcher
I don't know the correct way of doing this, but a simple hack would be to have a script running in the background which checks the contents of a bunch of folders every n minutes and uses the associated timestamps to determine if the file was modified in that span of time
You would definitely need some native OS code here, to write the monitoring service/client. I'd select C++ if you want it to be cross platform. If you decide to go with .Net, for example, you can use the FileSystemWatcher class to achieve what you need (documentation and here's a related article).
Kind of an old thread, but I am faced with doing something similar and wanted to throw in my thoughts. The route I'm going is to have a ruby script that watches a given directory and checks the timestamps. Once all files have been uploaded, the script saves the latest timestamp and then polls the directory again, checking if any files/folders have been added. If files are found, then the script uploads them and updates the global timestamp, etc...
The downside is that setting up a ruby script to run continually (or as a service) is somewhat painful. But it's not an overwhelming task, just needs to be thought out properly.
Also depends on if your users are competent enough to have ruby installed or if you have to package everything up into a one-click installer as well. That, to me, is the hardest part to figure out.