15.8. GVFS Tools and xdg-utils in GNOME
GVFS
ships with several commands that may come useful for scripting or testing. A set of POSIX commands counterparts is offered:
gvfs-cat
gvfs-less
gvfs-mkdir
gvfs-mount
gvfs-rename
gvfs-set-attribute
gvfs-copy
gvfs-ls
gvfs-move
gvfs-rm
gvfs-trash
gvfs-info
gvfs-save
gvfs-tree
Some more additional commands are provided for more control of
GVFS
specifics:
gvfs-monitor-dir
gvfs-monitor-file
gvfs-mime
gvfs-open
All these commands are native GIO clients, there is no need for the fallback
FUSE
daemon to be running. Their purpose is not to be drop-in replacements for POSIX commands, in fact, a very little range of switches is supported. In their basic form, an URI string (instead of a local path) is taken as an argument.
This all allows GNOME to be well-supported within
xdg-tools
(a freedesktop.org interoperability project). For example, the commonly used xdg-open
actually calls gvfs-open
when a running GNOME session is detected, reading file type associations from the correct location.
The following are a few examples of the GVFS commands usage:
- To lists all files in
/tmp
on a local file system, execute:$
gvfs-ls file:///tmp
- The command below lists contents of a text file from a remote machine:
$
gvfs-cat ssh://joe@ftp.myserver.net/home/joe/todo.txt
- To copy the referenced text file to a local
/tmp
directory, run:$
gvfs-copy ssh://joe@ftp.myserver.net/home/joe/todo.txt /tmp/
Note
For user convenience,
bash
completion is provided as a part of the package.