xcv: Taking the long way around

Sometimes it’s difficult for me to see the practicality of someone’s invention. I understand that their perspective brought them to a particular point and they solved a problem with a program, but it appears they’ve taken the very long way around.

This is xcv, which in my eye seems to be taking the aforementioned circuitous route.

If you can follow the steps there, xcv seems to work by either copying or moving files (at your request) to a third location, then waiting for the command to paste them into a target. A breakdown, step-by-step, is on the home page.

In that sense it seems to break down the cp or mv command into steps, and give you more control over the results. I suppose the practicality of that would be in cases where you have files from many different locations, all moving to one new directory. xcv technically reduces the number of commands it would take to do that … I think.

That’s about the only time I can think where xcv would be preferable to the standard tools available, and only if other things like find and some advanced commands are ruled out. It may be that you can see xcv at work in another situation.

As for myself, I probably won’t keep this around. I can see one, perhaps two cases where this would benefit me, and they’re so rare as to be annual events, at best. And in one of those, an extended find command does the trick quite well.

All the same it may be a useful tool for you, if you can see where it would be to your benefit to break down your task, and take the long way around.