I somewhat like konqueror, but it has problems, and I would rather one of X's probably simpler file managers work. Either konqueror crashed more since KDE 2.x, or I forgot how much it did in 2.x, but that is not what I consider critical.

One earlier time I used konqueror to copy data to an external hard disk, it did not copy files in a soft linked directory. They did not fit in my home directory (I do not use quotas) which had its own large partition: they were on the /usr, which was also large but otherwise mostly unused. My cd backup was either old or was an erased cdrw, so now all that data is lost. That is because konqueror also overwrote my backup external hard disk's older copy of the directory with a link file! Fortunately it was just up to 4.6GB of DOS/9x* dchmelik and POSIX OS binaries and source, but it will take months to recover. Please add options to not overwrite directories with links and if it is not chosen then for prompting. It would be good to have a 'backup mode' that overwrites no directories with links unless it is in a complicated mode where it prompts, though that would pause backup.

Other things about konqueror are that it is inconsistent with the file view mode and even the icon size (though I have always had 'save view changes per folder' the latter changes randomly with folders or views! 'Detailed' and 'info list views' should be able have small/no icons, and 'multicolumn view' should be able to show more of the names than icons.

Other extremely distracting konqueror things I mentioned in my kate post: italicized menus and underlines and other graphics including extra icons and a sidebar seem non-removeable, and konqueror cannot be bound to an xterm/konsole.

How did you copy the files? If you used drag and drop ensure you actually select either 'Move' or 'Copy' as I do know there is a 'Link' option. Also Konqueror does not follow soft links because they could point to the soft link, and thus cause infinite recursion, so that is a Safety feature.

bcooksley wrote:How did you copy the files? If you used drag and drop ensure you actually select either 'Move' or 'Copy' as I do know there is a 'Link' option. Also Konqueror does not follow soft links because they could point to the soft link, and thus cause infinite recursion, so that is a Safety feature.

I selected, copied, and moved them. I looked for a 'link' option when I selected a link recently, but I did not see anything, and you said it does not copy soft links, so I do not know what the point of it and your meaning are. You cannot really call konqueror's not copying files in soft links a 'safety' feature. It is an unsafe stability feature. It should check the link and make it ro while copying.

--David

You only get the 'link' option when drag-dropping a file / folder from one place to another.

It did not copy the files below the soft link, it copied the soft link itself just like the UNIX 'cp' command does. In fact, 'cp' does not even copy symlinks by default unless '-r' ( copy recursively ) is provided, even then it just copies the soft link as is. You could supply the '-H' option as well, but it only follows and copies the first level of soft links. Therefore, Konqueror is merely playing safe, and by what is expected behaviour with soft links.

Also, soft links can recurse infinitely, therefore copying the soft link directly is the safest option, Otherwise we could end up in a infinite loop. how do you intend on checking soft links in a cross platform manner? ( Windows does not support soft links )

bcooksley wrote:[...]therefore copying the soft link directly is the safest option, Otherwise we could end up in a infinite loop. how do you intend on checking soft links in a cross platform manner? ( Windows does not support soft links )

It is not safe for backups if you do not know where they all are. Loops could be checked for. Windows is pretty useless and irrelevant; how it makes things more useless for people is irrelevant for deciding what should not be done on POSIX (or if Windows is now more NT-based and implements POSIX, then I mean Unix-like ones, or other Unix standards. There needs to be alternatives to cp and tar for backups.)

Another konqueror problem is that when you select several files to set permissions on, it does not do it: it seems to leave them all as they were. I am trying to switch to using X/KDE as non-root, but my home data is in '/root,' and I cannot change the folders with konqueror. Maybe I can type chmod, but the 'entry' permission might have to be in another argument; I had not tried it... however I have about hundreds of folders I need to change: chmod is not really a choice.

Most experts/programmers say do things non-root, including running X, but if rc scripts (or runlevels) do not start X, one has to enable it by hand, and when you do that or try to transition to using non-root, tens or hundreds of things are still set only for root (i.e. many programs, and folders in '/root' that should be recursively set 'x' except for non-folders) and are too hard to change. So-called experts do not mention any of that, or answer how to solve it the very hard ways or change it to be easier in the future; they do not admit that too much of the setup is still forced to be like a network server where people login to shells (even allowing X.)

KDE 4 is multi platform, which includes Windows. No application within trunk/KDE will include platform specific code, because then you get code duplication. Hence the reason for Solid, Phonon.

There are alternatives such as Ark. In 4.2 the service menus have returned, making it easy to compress a folder.

I just tested setting permissions on two files, and it applied to both of them successfully. Worked for two folders as well. You might want to check that your user is allowed to modify the files. It also might have been fixed in 4.2, since I run trunk.