Copying files from Linux to MAC

[Robert Heller]

At Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:39:44 -0500 Nigel Horne <njh at bandsman.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> Geert Janssens wrote:
> >> My business partner has a MAC.  If I zip Gnucash's files and email them
> >> to her she can read them, but they open read-only.  Any thoughts?
> >>     
> > There should be no need to zip them. GnuCash compresses the files by default 
> > using gzip.
> >
> > It the files are read-only for her, it's likely she didn't really unzip the 
> > file, but her Mac may be treating the zip file as a read-only folder. So as 
> > long as the file is inside the archive, your partner can't change the files.
> >
> > Try to send her the file without zipping it first and see what happens.
> >   
> Please don't assume that I zipped to compress the files - that isn't the 
> reason I zipped them.
> 
> There are a lot of files in the Gnucash directory on my Linux machine, 
> so not just one file.  That's why I zipped it so that it was all on one 
> archive file, and I don't know that her desktop would read a tar file.
> 
> So the next question is, which file in my directory should I send?  Or 
> should I try tar? And will that fix the permissions problem?

There are two things:

There is the directory containing the GnuCash settings and saved
reports, etc. (~/.gnucash).  You *probably* don't want to send this. 

Then somewhere is your actual data file -- there is only one, but in the
directory where it lives will be a pile of backup files and log files. 
You only need to send the one data file and not any of the backup files
and log files.

Again: WARNING: you need to be careful about coordinating who writes to
this file and when.  *Normally* GnuCash uses a lock file to prevent
multiple incarnations (either from the same account/session or from
different users accessing it from separate account via a shared file
system) of GnuCash from accessing a given data file.  By transfering a
copy of the data file to another machine you are potientally breaking
this.  If your partner adds a transaction to her *copy* and then
you add one to *your* copy, you now have two sets of books that cannot
be reconciled. You will get to pick one of the files as your books and
lose changes made to the other file. BE CAREFUL!


> 
> > Geert
> >   
> -Nigel
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-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933
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