SO frustrated trying to merge music folders on Mac, help me oh help me please

...for the love of God, Montresor! Or maybe for the love of Steve Jobs?

I tend to prefer Mac over Wintel, but one area the Mac SUCKS is trying to merge folders. I posted about this a few years back, never did solve it, gave up, trying AGAIN. Scenario:
Red machine has folders/subfolders like this:
RED MUSIC
BLACK SABBATH
1st album
2nd album
another drive is like this
BLUE MUSIC
BLACK SABBATH
2nd album
3rd album
and all I want to do, please oh pretty please with cream and sugar, is merge them to get
MUSIC
BLACK SABBATH
1st album
2nd album
3rd album
It is SO simple conceptually, yet in many years I have NEVER been able to do this. Of course, really there are way more folders and subfolders and loose files within the folders but still, it ain't rocket science.

I am not trying to copy, not wanting to replace, NOT trying to sync or clone.* I want to MERGE one-way without losing contents. Most anything I try on the Mac wants to just Replace, overwriting and therefore losing either the 1st or 2nd album. There IS a "Merge" option but it only shows up randomly, even if I option-drag. Even then, currently dragging from one part of an external drive to another location on the same drive I get "Error 0" which if you Google blames FAT32. But I just checked with Disk Utility and the drive is Mac OS Extended (Journaled), so it just ain't workin' :realmad: [Oh this is a 2013 MacBook Air with High Sierra, but same problem on a variety of machines and OS versions]

I am really truly SO SO SO frustrated, and wasting so much time on this over the years. If you can solve this I will seriously buy you dinner, it is driving me NUTS, I should have been done with this in 10 minutes. Actually by now I probably could have just gone through folder by folder!

https://lifehacker.com/use-the-ditto-command-to-properly-merge-folders-on-mac-1645695622
has an example of the Ditto command in Terminal. I've used terminal, but never sure what the ~ means in the path example. Also not sure Ditto will merge SUB-folders.

If I Google for apps or software, they seem designed more for merging text/software code, and not really doing what I want.

*because for example I have a music folder on this MacBook Air with a few new things I've used recently, which I want to back up into the main music folder on an external drive. This machine does not have enough space to sync/clone the whole music library.

You can use the 'rsync' command to get this accomplished pretty quickly.

To start, ensure that the destination MUSIC folder is empty when you begin and the command you would use is

This will get you the result you want in the MUSIC folder with the '[/COLOR]BLACK SABBATH' folder and the sub-folders underneath it.

Thanks! what does the -abuP part do?

I do so admire people like you, Ashwin, who have such a familiarity with code and Terminal. The mere thought of entering this new world gives me the jitters.

Ian

IWT said:

I do so admire people like you, Ashwin, who have such a familiarity with code and Terminal. The mere thought of entering this new world gives me the jitters.

Ian

Click to expand...

Thanks Ian. As a developer who started in the Linux world, it's hard to avoid the command line and now I totally prefer that more than anything. A lack of a formidable command line system is a downer for me. For a few years when I was stuck with Windows (and before Powershell) I was burdened with their silly terminal. I would use Cygwin to get around that and now Powershell does a better job, but it is no Bash.