Copy and Paste

[macandy]

This probably has a really simple solution but it's become too much of an irritation, does anybody know why when I copy and paste a list of items OSX 10.3.9 rearranges the order of the list. I am trying to clean up a server data base by using 'find' to get a list but cannot print the results list which is too long to display in one screen +-150 items, if I copy and paste into a printable document the order is very random. I remember in OS 9 it was possible to print a windows contents but that seems to be gone now.

[DCurry]

You can still print a window listing, you just need a free little app called PrintWindow. Check on VersionTracker.com to download it.

[macandy]

Thanks Dan
still a bit confused as to why copy / paste shuffles the order seems a bit wierd.

[MarkDouma]

Originally Posted by macandy

Thanks Dan
still a bit confused as to why copy / paste shuffles the order seems a bit wierd.

I believe it has to do with the Model-View-Controller and datasource paradigms.

Let's say you have a Finder window in List View with 200 items in it. Internally in its memory, the Finder has an ordered list of those items called the "Model". The model isn't really visible in the normal sense of the word, but it is used to generate what you see in the Finder window. A Finder window is a "View", or a particular representation of the data in the model. For example, say you have the window set up to sort the list by date modified. What's basically happening is that the Finder takes the information from the model and shows a representation of it to you in a certain way: sorted by date modified. If you click the Date Modified column to reverse the sort order, only the order of how the items are displayed in the view is changed; the internal order of the items in the model remains the same. By having the sorting behavior only affect the displayed representation of the items, the Finder can potentially have more than one representation of the same items. For example, you could have three Finder windows, each open to the same folder in list view, and have each window sorted by different criteria: the first by Name, another by Date Modified, and another by Size.

When you select the items in list view and choose Edit > Copy, what's probably happening is that the Finder is copying the order of the items as they are in the model rather than how they appear to be sorted in the Finder window. The end result when you paste them is that they can often appear to be in random order.

A way to workaround this issue is to first switch the view of the Finder window from List View to Column view. In column view, items can only be listed in one order, alphabetical, so it appears that the Finder will also order the items alphabetically internally in the model.

So, a quick Command-3, Command-C, Command-2 should switch the window to column view, copy the list as you would like, and then switch it back to the way it was. The items should then most likely be pasted alphabetically as you'd expect.

Hope this helps.....

[macandy]

That certainly makes sense but there seems to be a bit of confusion here because what I'm trying to print is not a 'Finder' window but a 'Find' Results window.
The setup I have is 2 Macs running Preps each creating .ps files which are copied to a Brisque server. Once a job is completed the job on the Mac is archived and the files deleted from the server. However I'm finding lots of files still on the server that haven't been deleted and space is becoming an issue. Solution do a file search on both Macs for ant .ps files, print out list and then delete from the server any files not on the list. But the list has about 150 items on it I cannot print from the Find Results window even with Print Window so I'm forced to select all and copy paste into another page to get a print. The scrambled result makes really slow work of what I had hoped would be a simple job.