7 Easy Ways To Fiddle With Files On Your Mac

The Mac has a split personality. Rather, Mac users come in two basic flavors. Those of us who want to get good things done with a minimum of fuss and bother. And those of us who have a craving for the geekier side of Mac usage.

Using File Buddy 9 helps you get your geek on even if you don’t crave the notoriety of being a Mac know-it-all. Managing Mac files is rather simple and straightforward using OS X’s Finder. File Buddy opens up a whole new world of file management.

First and foremost, it’s best to describe File Buddy as a tool bag of utilities which help Mac users manage files and folders in ways well beyond what we learned by using the Mac’s Finder.

There’s more, but these are the 7 Easy Ways To Fiddle With Files On Your Mac.

#7 - Controls

File Buddy is a straightforward control panel-like window which gives you control over different file attributes.

The tool bar at the top will Show you where a file or folder resides on your Mac, lists specific Actions, allows you to Copy or Move, and much more. It’s as self explanatory as a utility can be.

# 6 - Info

Get Info is a keyboard command which brings a little pop up to your Mac’s screen. It tells you the name of the file or folder, the location, the size, displays the icon, even displays file permissions. That’s about it.

File Buddy has an Info Window that will knock your socks off. I’m not sure what it does to the unsuspecting Mac user not wearing socks at the time. Extra features show up in the Info Window which gives you more control of the file or folder’s contents.

#6 - Droplets

Since File Buddy makes changes to files, many or one at a time, wouldn’t it be nice to automate some of those changes so you don’t have to make the same settings with every change?

Droplets is a feature which does just that. It automates the changes you make to files the most, which saves time and effort, and reduces mistakes.

#5 - Finding Files

Your Mac has hundreds of thousands of files. Even with cheap hard disk space, many of those files may be duplications.

File Buddy has a simple utility which lets you find duplicate files and folders, so you can back up and archive, or delete to save disk space on your Mac.

#4 - Cleaning

Our Macs tend to get messy after awhile. All that hard disk space makes it easy to collect files, and provides little incentive to clean up files.

File Buddy can remove language resource files you don’t need and get you hundreds of extra megabytes in the process. It’ll erase files, folders, and delete both data and resource forks from files, which reduces file size.

Your Mac’s Launch Services database can get a little messy, too, and File Buddy can rebuild it for you.

#3 - File Renaming

The feature can be more valuable than any other if you deal with hundreds or thousands of files, many of which need to be renamed using some kind of sequence.

Files can be renamed based on some kind of pattern, by dates, by sequence, and you can use the Droplet feature to automate the changes and renaming to save time.

#2 - Search

No file and folder utility would be worth much if you were not able to search for files in multiple ways. Think of File Buddy’s search mechanism as an enhancement to Spotlight.

You can search for files using other criteria, such as owners. I prefer Spotlight for most of my Mac file searches.

#1 - The Grab Bag

File management is more extensive with File Buddy, and this is where you can get your geek on. For example, create and install custom icons, use the administrator mode to manage or mangle files where you don’t have permission.

Even geekier is the ability to create symbolic links and aliases (the geekier side of the Mac’s Unix heritage), or find and repair broken aliases. File Buddy even lets you move, copy, delete files, and copy invisible files using options not in the Mac’s Finder.

There’s also a built in utility to create instant snapshots of a file folder or a disk so you can compare what it looks like both before and after an application or utility is installed on your Mac.

My favorite non-geek feature is the ability to save window configurations; handy for when my Mac’s screen is hopelessly cluttered. File Buddy does much more, though much of it favors the geek-wannabe, rather than the average Mac user. Still, if you need more power, you’ve come to the right Mac utility.