accessing online-only files from macos terminal

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kjmed wrote:

I have a large, shared dropbox folder that is set to "online-only", but I want to make specific files available offline. I know I can do this via right clicks in the Finder window for individual files, but I need to do this for many files. How can I do this via the macOS terminal?

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There are no terminal/command line options for setting a file as online-only or available offline.

Well that sucks. Can I do it without individually clicking every file I need (and without making the entire root folder available offline)?

Hi kjmed, currently it isn't possible to perform the action you want without manually selecting each file to mark them as available offline.

Are you serious? That is going to mean hours of tediously navigating folders and manually clicking specific files.

This is 100% a bug. Is the dropbox team working on fixing it?

This would be the normal behavior for the Dropbox desktop application, as there hasn't ever been a command line option to mark files as online-only.

We do appreciate your feedback on how to improve the Dropbox service, and take all comments into consideration.

The bug isn't related to command-line access specifically. The bug is that apps (including terminal) cannot interact with files at all. Until recently, if any app (including terminal) tried to access a file in a folder set to "smart sync" or whatever it's called, dropbox would automatically download it if it wasn't already available locally. Thus, a folder could be kept on the cloud, and files accessed locally as needed.

After the recent macOS change, if there is a file in a "smart sync" folder, it shows up as zero bytes for any app or terminal command that tries to read it, and thus it can't actually be used. You confirmed that the only way around this is to manually click every individual file or folder that I need to make them available offline.

This particular shared group folder is several TB and contains many thousands of files, the vast majority of which I do not need to read, so I'm not about to make the entire folder as "available offline" and download all of that.

This wouldn't be the case, since if any app or service attempts to access an online-only file, the file would download in order to be used and it would become 'Available', which is different to available offline. 

Could you confirm that opening a file in an app doesn't result in the file getting downloaded? How large is the file you're trying to access?

That is how it used to work, but I can confirm that if I have a 20KB csv file that is "online only", it shows up as zero bytes in Finder. If I try to read that file in, say, Matlab, python, or terminal, I just get an error. If I right-click the file in finder, make it available offline, then Matlab and other apps can read it.

Microsoft Excel doesn't have this problem. If I try to open a zero byte online-only csv file, it automatically triggers Dropbox to make the file available offline. Presumably this is due to some kind of specific dropbox Office extension or integration?

It doesn't matter what file you open, and which program you use, the Dropbox desktop application should detect that the file is being requested and download it for it to be viewed. You can see this with txt files, PDFs, images, and videos, so it isn't restricted to Office files. 

Could you clarify how you're opening the file in these programs? Is it only via the command line, or are you using a GUI to open it, or by double clicking the file in Finder?

Double-clicking in Finder works fine. Using a standard file IO function like "fopen" in Matlab, or the "grep" command in terminal, does not work. If my GUI app uses a file dialog to let the user identify a file, and then use an IO function to access that filename, it does not work. General purpose IO streams return zero bytes of data.