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Dropbox on Linux (limitations)?

Looking at using a server (ubuntu) to implement a new feature to a dropbox app I've already built.

The feature would be a simple -- user of app selects file, which is then duplicated to a special user of my app (which happens to be a linux box with the dropbox-linux sync tools installed).

Both 'users' are normal dropbox user account (not business type accounts).

The question is, its been a while since I tried using the dropbox linux stuff as found here: https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux

Any limitations anyone wants to warn me about as compared to the win/apple versions? I'm sure there are lots of issues, but only ones I think that might be a concern to me are performance related (slower then on mac/pc), or reliability issues not easily addressed by some process monitor or something.

Of course could implement what I'm thinking with a 'server' running osx/win but that's no fun, much rather spin up what I want to do using the latest dev methods on VM type worlds.

--Brian

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brian q.

Waiting for others to respond but in the meantime....

-- Installer for linux looks good, CLI abilities look all there and even ability to include/exclude dirs works well

An additional question comes up after now playing with the latest....

Any thoughts on how one might hook when something changes, ie sync completes? Vrs just polling the CLI (boring).

In the dropbox API/app world, you'd just monitor the cursor for a give file/object. I'm wondring if there's a notifier of some sort to the OS that was implemented in things or do I need to edit the source and recompile?

-- Brian

Greg-DB

Hi Brian, the Dropbox API itself doesn't offer much in the way of interfacing with the official client unfortunately, so I don't have much to offer on that side, but I'll pass this along as a feature request. You could look into monitoring file events using fsnotify or fanotify or whatever the equivalent is on your system, and just look in the Dropbox folder.

Also, for reference, if you haven't already found it, this help article may be helpful for using the Linux client.

And as far as limitations are concerned, I would also check out the "Case conflicts", "Beginning characters on Mac and Linux", and "Monitoring more than 10,000 folders on Linux" sections in this help article.

yousefali2020

@Greg-DB wrote:
Hi Brian, the Dropbox API itself doesn't offer much in the way of interfacing with the official client unfortunately, so I don't have much to offer on that side, but I'll pass this along as a feature request. You could look into monitoring file events using fsnotify or fanotify or whatever the equivalent is on your system, and just look in the Dropbox folder.

Also, for reference, if you haven't already found it, this help article may be helpful for using the Linux client.

And as far as limitations are concerned, I would also check out the "Case conflicts", "Beginning characters on Mac and Linux", and "Monitoring more than 10,000 folders on Linux" sections in this help article.

Interesting to know about the details.