I went to copy a particularly large windows folder of mine, (167,000 files) to my Ubuntu24 documents directory, and Nemo spent quiet a bit of time “Preparing…” where it counted up all the files.
I noticed this in Nautilus also…
This took over 10 minutes, time it COULD have spent actually copying the files.
Is there a way to bypass the “count em up before copying” part?
It’s nice to have a status telling me it is going to take 3 hours to copy the files but start copying the files THEN count them WHILE you are copying… You know, multitask???
It’s the same in other file managers too (e.g. Thunar). When the “Preparing” takes an annoyingly long time, I usually bypass it by using cp or rsync in Terminal to do the copying instead of using the file manager.
what comes to mind is one way…
issue a CLI command (terminal using the -v (verbose, to show progress) in mv or cp command depending if your moving or copying the files) instead of using the GUI … bypasses the niceties and goes to work
Another idea … you might also want to route the files into new structure, in addition to copying.
Install Recoll.
Let it index either the desktop or target directories. First indexing will take some time. Thereafter indexing is auto updated. Or at times you might reindex after major changes.
Now in Recoll GUI in query field choose your filters.
Example … ext:md … means show all files with extension *.md (markdown). Hover over query field to see options … or use recollq in terminal for CLI usage.
Next having selected what files interests you, prepare a script to walk through the list of files in GUI … one by one… to perform a looped UI action.
Copy Filepath
Perform Action
Tab down to next file
…
I suggest Actiona … then go and have a coffee break while the two (Recoll and Actiona) chunter away.
While this is a bit of an annoyance, I’m thinking maybe I don’t copy a large number of files so often and I am making a mountain out of a molehill (I do that a lot.)
