Watch file transfer from both source and target, cross-platform

Question

I often transfer files between my Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.10 machines, in both directions, on my home network. Usually I just use the window file manager (Nautilus or Windows Explorer) on whichever machine I'm sitting at to initiate the copy/move in whichever direction. Sometimes I use WinSCP on the Windows machine because Samba and/or Windows doesn't seem to cope with many large simultaneous transfers.

So my question is, is there an app that I could use to initiate a copy/move from either machine, and allow me to view progress/notify me of completion on the other machine?

For example, I start the transfer on the Windows machine, go and work on my Ubuntu machine. From my Ubuntu machine I track progress and get notified of completion (of one or all transfers).

Answer 1

I don't know an app that does exactly what you want, but I can tell you how to create one. You could create a simple shell script to watch the file size. Start with something like:

while sleep 1; do ls -l $targetfile; done

That will show progress, and if you know the file size by 'ls -l' at the source, you'll know when it's done.

Of course you could expand this to parse out the source and target file sizes, compare them, and let you know when they match. Depends how automated you want it.

I'm assuming you have ssh access between both machines. If you don't already have it, Cygwin is a nice package on Windows to give you a Linux-like environment.