Laura,

Have you seen the filemerge utility that is kept hidden in /Developer/Applications/Utilities ?

Provides a nice interface to diff'ing and merging files *and* folders - might save you some grief.

I also use SyncDifferent for such feats.

Nice interface.

Blah! Finally getting sick of a non *nix based local enviro so I am switching over to Mac. I am really disappointed with alot of these tools, I miss having EVERYTHING in one package, debugger, terminals, ftp/sftp/ftps, svn and cvs support etc etc.

It really is to bad tortoiseSVN is not available its such a great application. Eclipse is what I have stuck with for now even though its deathly slow :(

Have a look at Changes (http://changesapp.com/). You can use it to merge folders AND files.

Here's a tiny GUI AppleScript called Merge Folders 1.0.1; it's freeware I've found that seems to do exactly what everyone is asking for, if I understand correctly.

It uses the UNIX cp command, so it ends up acting just like a "normal" OS in the sense that it just merges multiple folders together, maintaining the structural integrity of all sub-folders, and not overwriting files with the same name. I was very surprised to find it, because it works wonderfully. It's got a GUI, and it presents you with a browse dialog asking for the source folder(s). You don't have to browse, though; you can just drag the source folder(s) into the browse dialog. Then it asks for a destination; again, just drag the destination folder. It then asks what to do about existing files: Overwrite, Cancel, or Skip? Hit "Skip"; you now have a merged folder in the destination. All sub-folders and directory structures seem to be maintained perfectly.

Here's the link; just click the link to "Merge Folders 1.0.1" to download once you get to the page:

http://scriptbuilders.net/files/mergefol...

Since it's freeware I'm assuming the author won't mind my posting the script here; his name is Bruce Philips and his website is http://brucep.net/

And here's the script:

on run
choose folder with prompt "Get contents of these folders:" default location (path to home folder) ¬
with showing package contents and multiple selections allowed
open (result)
end run

on open droppedItems
choose folder with prompt "Merge into this folder:" default location (path to home folder) ¬
with showing package contents
set target to quoted form of POSIX path of result

display dialog "How to handle existing files?" buttons {"Overwrite", "Cancel", "Skip"} default button 3
if (button returned of result) is "Overwrite" then
set overwriteOption to "f"
else
set overwriteOption to "n"
end if

repeat with thisItem in droppedItems
if (folder of (info for thisItem without size)) is true then
get quoted form of POSIX path of thisItem

try
do shell script "cd " & result & "; /bin/cp -RP" & overwriteOption & " ./* " & target
on error errorMsg number errorNum
display dialog "Error (" & errorNum & "):" & return & return & errorMsg buttons "OK" default button 1 with icon caution
end try
end if
end repeat

display dialog "Script finished." buttons "OK" default button 1 with icon note
end open

I believe the cli app ditto does this. According to Apple, their implementation of ditto defaults to preserve extended attributes (be cautious- many apps don't preserve the extended attributes) and resource forks. So a ditto command between the two folder contents should do the trick:

>> ditto myfirstfolder/folder1 ~/folder2

in the above instance I'm moving/merging the contents of folder1 into folder2. In the default mode, this will copy anything within folder1 into folder2 (if you want, folder1 can have the same name in both cases, "~/folder1" in the example above- I don't think ditto cares). It will overwrite anything already there, but will keep anything in folder2 that isn't in folder1. In this way, it will merge the contents. I believe there's also a flag to overwrite only if new, or to ask for overwrite. Check out "man ditto" at the command line.

Hope this helps a bit,
-Allen