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-catgvfs-lessgvfs-mkdirgvfs-mountgvfs-renamegvfs-set-attributegvfs-copygvfs-lsgvfs-movegvfs-rmgvfs-trashgvfs-infogvfs-savegvfs-tree
Some more additional commands are provided for more control of
GVFS specifics:
gvfs-monitor-dirgvfs-monitor-filegvfs-mimegvfs-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
/tmpon a local file system, execute:$gvfs-ls file:///tmp - The command below lists contents of a text file from a remote machine:
$gvfs-cat ssh://joe@ftp.myserver.net/home/joe/todo.txt - To copy the referenced text file to a local
/tmpdirectory, run:$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.
