One thing I love about my Mac is the ability to set the color of a folder. I’m in the habit of naming folders for various stages of my workflow: CE (copyedit), QC1 (first set of galleys), and QC2 (second set of galleys), and by coloring the current stage green, I’m less likely to accidentally open ch01.pdf from the wrong stage. Additionally, whenever I have something I know I need to remember at a given stage, I can go into the folder, mkdir or touch “Do not forget to blah blah blah” and color the new item red so I see it when I finally reach that stage.
Now that I’m using Windows a bit more, I miss that feature. I tried to use a custom folder icon, but all hell broke loose when I tried to sync to my Mac using unison. First of all, Windows marks the folder as read-only when you use a custom icon. Then, unison dutifully propagates the property change over to my Mac, which changes the folder permisions to r-xr-xr-x, so I start getting errors from unison along the lines of “Failed: Error in processing a transfer instruction: Permission denied”.
So, I can mark the directory as read/write, but according that KB entry, “Windows sets the read-only attribute on the folder to instruct Windows to look for the Desktop.ini file.” How strange. Isn’t there some metadata attribute that Windows could use rather than overloading the read-only flag?
I noticed you were using Unison to sync between Windows and Mac OS X and encountering the “Failed: Error in processing transfer instruction” Error. I am trying to sync a tree (~/Documents) between my two machines (Linux / MacBook Pro) using unison and have persistant difficulties with certain subdirectories. They all have sensible permissions, but for some unknown reason the subdirectories refuse to syncronise. When the sync is attempted I just get a set of “Aborted” messages.
The subdirectories in question seem to syncronise perfectly well if I refer to them directly. Just not when they are a subset of a larger sync process.
Have you come across this issue at all?
I’ve just come across the same issue after updating the folder icon on my XP box and then trying to sync with a linux server via unison
How stupid is that, using the read-only flag on a folder (that MS claim is otherwise ignored) to tell it to look for a custom icon?
Since it’s setting the read-only property of the root sync folder I can’t think of a suitable ignore rule to use in unison that won’t cause the whole folder (and all sub folders as a result) to get ignored. The only thing I could do is switch the sync properties to include a list of all the folders I want to sync inside of that folder (ie a list of all the current sub folders), however if any new ones are created I’d have to manually add them to the sync rules or they’ll never get synced – not a good plan!
Looks like I’m losing that nice new folder icon – shame
For any possible future reference by me and anyone else stumbling here like I did:
Perms = 0
will cause unison to ignore file permissions. This works if you don’t care about file permissions of anything in the entire folder, and just want to stop it from setting your directories read-only on the non-Windows machines (since I’m running it WindowsLinuxLinux, I only place the Perms directive in the config for the copy of Unison I run on the Windows machine).