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Background Jobs

A copy, move or delete can run in the background while you go on using XeFM: browse, view files, even start another operation.

Sending an operation to the background

When it asks to start. The Copy and Move confirmations have a Background button. The operation starts with no progress dialog. Delete has none, because deleting is usually over at once. A long delete can still be sent back from its progress dialog.
While it runs. Press the progress dialog’s Run in background button. Its other button, Cancel, asks before it stops anything.

Seeing what is running

The right end of the status bar shows the job:

⠋ Copy 42% +1

The spinner in front turns while the job runs. +1 is how many more jobs wait behind it.

Click it, or choose View → Background Jobs… (jobs), to list every job: what it does, from where to where, and how far it is. The list keeps up while it is open, and closes by itself once the last job has finished.

Copy 12 items  ~/photos → s3://bucket/backup — 42% (1.2G / 2.9G)
Move report.pdf  ~/Downloads → ~/Documents — paused, queued (Enter runs it now)
Copy notes.txt  ~/work → ~/backup — queued (Enter removes it)

Choose the running job to bring its progress dialog back. From there you can watch it, cancel it, or send it back.
Choose a paused job to run it now, in front, with its progress dialog.
Choose a queued job that has not started to remove it from the queue.

One at a time

Background jobs run one after another, in the order you sent them, because they usually compete for the same disk or the same server. Only one of them is ever running.

If you send an operation to the background while another job is running there, it pauses and waits its turn. It pauses once the files it is working on are done, never in the middle of a file: a transfer to a server held open that long could time out. When its turn comes, it carries on where it stopped.

An operation you watch in front never waits for the queue.

A job that only reads — an extension’s checksum, say — never waits either: it runs beside whatever is running in the background.

When a job needs an answer

If a background job reaches a question, such as a file that already exists at the destination, it stops and waits. No dialog pops up in the middle of your work. The status bar shows instead:

⚠ Copy

Click it to open the jobs list, and choose the job. Its progress dialog comes back with the question, and once you answer, it carries on. Send it back with Run in background if you like.

When a job finishes

It does what a foreground operation does: the panes refresh, and the log says what was copied, moved or deleted, and what failed.

Quitting

If background jobs are still running or queued, Quit says so and starts on Cancel. Quitting anyway stops them part-way. Files already copied stay where they are. XeFM waits a few seconds for the file in progress to be cleaned up before it exits.

Similar-file scans

Find Similar Files scans appear in the same status bar segment and jobs list. They are not background jobs in the sense above: each runs as a program of its own, keeps running after you quit XeFM, and doesn’t count against the one-at-a-time queue.