Is there a difference between bulk-moving files with Drag & Drop vs mv?
Use case:
Volume External_Drive_A has about 8000 files totalling 9GB. External_Drive_B has 74GB of free space. The desired end result is to move all the files from A to B so that A can be wiped and put to use in another location.
Drag & Drop approach is to open one Finder window for A, another Finder window for B, highlight all the files on A, then command-click-drag them to B.
mv approach is to open a Terminal session and invoke
mkdir /Volumes/External_Drive_B/A_legacy
mv /Volumes/External_Drive_A/* /Volumes/External_Drive/B/A_legacy/
Does Drag & Drop do anything behind-the-scenes in addition to the copy and remove, or is it strictly a thing of Beauty?
Answered by jmlumpkin below:
They differ! Drag & Drop brings the metadata, mv does not. I tested this by adding a phrase to the Spotlight Comments section on a text file's Get Info dialog. When I dragged and dropped the file across volumes, the phrase was present when I invoked Get Info on the destination; but when it used mv, the phrase was missing when I invoked Get Info on the destination.
Best Answer
In earlier versions of the Mac OS, Dragging and Dropping a file was actually closer to the 'ditto' command to retain resource forks, etc.