Icons don't refresh in finder

MFiend

Registered
I'm having this problem, where after I download something to a folder, the icon will not show up in the Finder. I can do a listing on the folder in the terminal, and I can see the file in other applications, but I cannot figure out how to make the Finder see it, other than to search for the file with Sherlock and reveal it.
Does anyone have any suggestions? This is REALLY frustrating!!

Thanks,
MFiend
 
if you close the window and open it again, or go up a directory and back down again it'll refresh. Often I have to log out and log back in again.

This is one of the classic displays of how MacOS and Unix don't get along. I wish Apple the best of luck in getting refresh issues to resolve correctly without burdening the system or sacrificing speed on slow connections (appleShare over a modem)
 
It seems to me that refreshing the contents of Finder windows would be a no-brainer. For one thing there are usually only a few Finder windows open. This gives ample time for a thread or two to run in the background checking up on changes to their directories. I'm sure a check for refresh every 2 seconds in each open window would hardly slow down the system.

The way it looks on my machine it seems like the Finder is caching for way too long. Maybe if it just purged its cache more often....

I think Apple can fix this, but they may have to consider the merits of a Cocoa-native Finder. Finder in MacOS X is a carbonized program, so in a way it serves as a benchmark for the state of Carbon. The lack of refreshing may be less to do with poor synchronization between the file system and the Finder itself and might be a weakness in the way Carbon abstracts the file system.

Who knows?
 
Having recently done a bunch of massively multithreaded programming, I have found that anything that does timed polling is horribly inefficient. There needs to be a communicating update mechanism that only talks when it has something to say. If I have a server connected to by several dozen people all loking at the same directory with say 1200 artist names in it, polling quickly becomes a burden to my system.

The best solution I can see is that a window viewing a directory would register itself with the directory and ask to be informed if any updates occured. Every folder and file have a last modified date. If the last modified date is the most recent of that item or any of its contents then it would be easy to determine what needs to be refreshed.

I don't really know enough about how the current system works to intelligently talk about how to change it. But I do feel that polling is a bad idea in general. If it's going to be done it should be less often, and at an interval determined by the server (if connection is remote) to properly handle load.

I agree it's possible, I just think it's out of my hands. Good luck Apple guys.
 
Creating (and trashing) a New Folder forces an update.

And for the future there is always the possibility for Apple to add a "Refresh" button, if this doesn't violate any MS patents :)
 
I've also noticed that sometimes files privileges shown in terminal by an ll command are different from privileges shown in finder info panel of the same files.
 
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