Transfer files listed in a user-specified text file

[hollasch]

Dependent on [1052205] simultaneous folder-change (directory "follow me").

Upload files and directories listed in a user-specified text file.

With the pairing logic outlined in [1052205], where there's an association between a local directory tree and a server directory tree, each line need only specify the file in one location (for example, using the local path). Optionally, each line could be prefixed with "send" or "receive" tokens.

[Alexander Schuch]

Can you please outline a use case about when someone actually would need something like that? I mean, there has to be a program, like a text-editor, which created a changed files list automatically. If someone is supposed to manually create such a file, uploading the files manually is about the same work.

[hollasch]

Consider a case where I want to transfer the .obj files of a bunch of directories, but nothing else. FileZilla doesn't support regular expressions on uploads, so this feature would offload the matching to whatever other program I'd choose.

Right now I'm wrestling with a problem where a bunch of zero-sized files are created when uploading 8000-9000 files. I have to hand launch an FTP session, find the zero-size files, then launch FileZilla, and for each erroneous file, change the local directory, then change the server directory, then upload the file, then go to the next file. This would be a lot easier if I could just re-upload those specific files I've identified as being zero sized.

Another scenario might be a case where I want to upload a handful of changed files out of thousands. I could have FileZilla grovel through the entire tree on the server and the local image, identify the changes, and upload the new files, but that could take many hours, versus a quick local scan and upload of the small group of files. That would be a radical performance boost.

For another case, suppose that I have a large tree of doc files. One subproject is renamed from "Frotzenjammer" to "iJammerPro 3000". Launch grep to find all files with that string, do a string replace on all of them, and then use the list of matched files to update the image on the server. Again, with a huge tree, this could be a hundred times faster than blindly looking through the entire tree for changed files.

In the situation above, one could also easily imagine a case where files matching some specific criteria are what you want, but NOT all files which are newer, as some of the newer files may not yet be ready to prop to the server.

I could keep going, but this should explain the type of scenarios I'm thinking of.

[Alexander Schuch]

FileZilla 3 has filters implemented. Check the last icon/button on the toolbar. Using that filter, you can select to only show OBJ-files on your local pane, and then upload the whole tree. As only (directories and) OBJ-files are shown, only those will be uploaded.

Maybe the other situations mentioned can be solved using the filter as well? Give it a try. :)

[hollasch]

That will certainly help when all of the target files share a common naming characteristic that no other files do, and when the tree in question is small. However, for all other cases where name filtering is insufficient (either there are many different files with different names or extensions) or where the file changes are unrelated to the actual file names (say a source tree sync operation), there's still no good way to specify a local list of files to upload.