Advanced Copy

Advanced Copy is a mod for the GNU cp and GNU mv tools which adds a progress bar and provides some info on what's going on. It was written by Florian Zwicke and released under the GPL.

This repository exists because the Advanced Copy website appears to be dead. You can still find it via the Internet Archive.

advcpmv-0.5-8.21.patch was the last patch released by the author (on February 14, 2013). advcpmv-0.6-8.24.patch (and following) are simply a rebase of that on top of the 8.24 version of coreutils.

Build instructions

Requires the following dependencies:

• patch
• gcc

Run the following command to download, patch, compile coreutils and generate the files: ./advcpmv/advcp and ./advcpmv/advmv.

Bash:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jarun/advcpmv/master/install.sh --create-dirs -o ./advcpmv/install.sh && (cd advcpmv && sh install.sh)

Fish:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jarun/advcpmv/master/install.sh --create-dirs -o ./advcpmv/install.sh; and begin; cd advcpmv; and sh install.sh; end

To install an older version than the latest one, you can specify the version by passing it as an argument to the install script (at the end of the command, before the closing parenthesis). For example, if you want to install advcpmv-0.8-8.32.patch you would modify the command above like so.

... sh install.sh 0.8 8.32 ...

Alternatively, if you have already cloned this repository, you can run install.sh with the path to one of the patch files as the only argument, and it will infer the advcpmv and coreutils versions from the filename.

sh install.sh advcpmv-0.8-8.32.patch

Usage

Copy the binaries in $PATH

Copy the binaries and use cpg -g and mvg -g instead of cp and mv:

sudo mv ./advcpmv/advcp /usr/local/bin/cpg
sudo mv ./advcpmv/advmv /usr/local/bin/mvg

Progress bar does not work with reflink (introduced v9.0 onwards). So reflink is disabled if using progress bar, left unchanged otherwise.

Alias

You can install the binaries and create aliases for bash (or whatever you use)

sudo mv ./advcpmv/advcp /usr/local/bin/
sudo mv ./advcpmv/advmv /usr/local/bin/

Bash:

echo -e 'alias cp=\x27/usr/local/bin/cpg -g\x27' >> ~/.bashrc
echo -e 'alias mv=\x27/usr/local/bin/mvg -g\x27' >> ~/.bashrc

Fish:

echo "alias cp '/usr/local/bin/advcp -g'" >> ~/.config/fish/config.fish
echo "alias mv '/usr/local/bin/advmv -g'" >> ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Function

The following functions work in Bash, Zsh, Ksh, Dash, and other POSIX-compatible shells. They keep the system cp and mv as the default and use Advanced Copy only when called with -g:

cp() {
	if [ "$1" = "-g" ]; then
		shift
		/usr/local/bin/advcp -g "$@"
	else
		command cp "$@"
	fi
}

mv() {
	if [ "$1" = "-g" ]; then
		shift
		/usr/local/bin/advmv -g "$@"
	else
		command mv "$@"
	fi
}

Fish does not support this function syntax; use the Fish aliases above instead.

## Upstream merge

The original author sent the patch to the team, that maintains the GNU CoreUtils. They won't merge this patch, because mv and cp are feature complete.