Check for Dropbox Conflicts using Terminal and/or launchd and terminal-notifier.

I made a version of this using Growl awhile ago (find it here) but I’ve since grown to prefer Notification Center, because clicking the notification can open the “Saved Search” in Finder if you use [terminal-notifier][tn].

1. Install terminal-notifier. Easiest way is via Homebrew.

2. Download the saved search file, make sure it’s named “dropbox-conflicts.savedSearch” and then save it to either one of these locations (note: you may have to create the folders):

   • ${HOME}/Dropbox/Application Support/

   • ${HOME}/Library/Saved Searches/

3. Download the launchd plist and make sure it’s named “com.tjluoma.dropbox-conflicts.plist” and save it to “$HOME/Library/LaunchAgents/“.

4. Download the shell script and make sure it’s named dropbox-conflicts.sh and save it to somewhere in your $PATH such as /usr/local/bin/dropbox-conflicts.sh and make it executable:

After the files are in place, you need to do two more things:

First, make the shell script executable:

	chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/dropbox-conflicts.sh

Second, I suggest a reboot, but if you want to try doing this without that, try entering this line in Terminal:

	launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.tjluoma.dropbox-conflicts.plist

A: I’m glad you asked. Every five minutes, launchd will check for files in your Dropbox have the words “conflicted copy” in the filename, which is what Dropbox uses when conflicts are created. If it finds any, it will show a notification in Mountain Lion or Mavericks’ Notification Center. It will look like this:

If you click on the notification, it will open a “Saved Search” in Finder which will also show any files with the words “conflicted copy” in the filename.

Combine this with km-diff-dropbox-duplicates -- my other script and Keyboard Maestro setup for comparing Dropbox duplicates -- and you can compare the conflicted copy with its original.

A: If you run dropbox-conflicts.sh from the command line, it will show you the duplicate files, and then open the saved search in Finder.

A: Yeah, you’re going to have to rename that, or else it will continually confuse this script. Sorry.