For a while now, I have had Anquet installed in a virtual machine instance of Windows XP but it has been throwing errors continuously on start up. Perhaps surprisingly, it only dawned upon me recently what might have been the cause. A bit of fiddling revealed that my storing the mapping data Linux side and sharing it into the VM wasn’t helping and copying it to a VM hard drive set things to rights. This type of thing can also cause problems when it comes getting Photoshop to save files using VirtualBox’s Shared Folders feature too. Untangling the situation is a multi-layered exercise. On the Linux side, permissions need to be in order and that involves some work with chmod (775 is my usual remedy) and chgrp to open things up to the vboxusers group. Adding in Windows’ foibles when it comes to networked drives and their mapping to drive letters brings extra complexity; shared folders are made visible to Windows as \\vboxsvr\shared_folder_name\. The solution is either a lot of rebooting, extensive use of the net use command or both. It induces the sort of toing and froing that makes copying things over and back as needed look less involved and more sensible if a little more manual than might be liked.

With Linux/UNIX, the command line remains ever useful and allows you to do all manner of things, including file copying that only adds new files to a destination. Here’s a command that accomplishes this in Linux:

cp -urv [source] [destination]

The u switch does the update while r ensures recursion (by default, cp only copies files from a source directory and not anything sitting in subfolders) and v tells the command to tell the user what is happening.

Though buried and hardly promoted, Windows also has its command line and here’s what accomplishes a similar result:

xcopy /d /u [source] [destination]

Anything’s better than having to approve or reject every instance where source and destination files are the same or, even worse, to overwrite a file when it is not wanted.

Copy and pasting between Windows programs can cause unwanted formatting to be carried over. Copying text from Internet Explorer into Outlook is one example of this that I see a lot and Word to Word does it too. A trick that I picked up for avoiding this copying of formatting comes from a while back: copying into Notepad and pasting from there. Doing the copy/paste shuffle in that way strips off the formatting baggage and alllows the default formatting for the particular destination to be applied. There may be other and slicker ways to do this but what I have described works for me.