“Move To” to a folder that ends with /

[garblewarble]

I noticed that Alfred’s “Move To” action doesn’t work if the destination folder ends with a /

 

It does work if the slash is in the beginning or somewhere in the middle. 

 

Alfred 2.8.3,

Mac OS X 10.11.4

[deanishe]

It's not entirely clear whether you're talking about a filepath or you have actually created a folder with slashes (colons) in its name. I'll assume the latter.

 

While this may indeed be a bug, the correct fix is Don't use slashes or colons in filenames.

 

You've doubtless noticed that the slash is used as the filepath separator on OS X, and as such it can't also do double duty as a valid character for a filename. They're mutually exclusive.

 

You might think you've created a file with a slash in the filename, but Finder is lying to you. Here I created two text files, "Name : with : colons.txt" in the terminal and "Name / with / slashes.txt" in Finder (a shell won't let you create a file with slashes in the name and Finder won't let you create a file with colons in the name).

 

As you can see, Finder didn't really name the file how it was told to and also lies about the filenames.
 

[garblewarble]

Thanks for the explanation, thought it might have something to do with the OS. Weird how OS X allows slashes in file names then, unlike colons.

 

(In case you’re wondering why I was using slashes in the first place, I was saving webpages into folders like “alfredforum.com” (maybe also something I shouldn’t do?) and I’d then press return and copy the url of the folder if I wanted to visit that website. OS X would only automatically select e.g. “alfredforum” though, and I noticed that putting a slash at the end would cause the complete “alfredforum.com/” to be selected. But yeah, it always felt a bit hacky.)

[deanishe]

 

Thanks for the explanation, thought it might have something to do with the OS. Weird how OS X allows slashes in file names then, unlike colons.

 

 

 

It's holdover from the old Mac OS, which used colons as path separators. In order to maintain the appearance of compatibility, OS X silently replaces slashes in names with colons and then lies about it.