PneumaticTube Update

Last year around this time I created a little command-line application to upload files to Dropbox from Windows. Since then I've added a few features, so I figured it was time to post an update.

The biggest change is support for chunked uploading. Dropbox requires chunked uploading for files larger than 150MB, and even for smaller files it's a nice feature to have because you can get progress updates on your upload. This feature took a little work, because the original library PneumaticTube was based on, DropNet, didn't have any async support and its successor, DropNetRT didn't have any chunked uploading support. But after a little porting work, PneumaticTube can handle uploading large files just fine and now has a couple of different progress indicator options.

The other big feature change is the ability to upload a whole folder to Dropbox. This makes PT a much more convenient tool for backup operations. Right now it only supports the top level of a folder (no recursion), but that may change in the future.

There've also been several bug fixes. One of these bugs was somewhat surprising: the progress indicators during chunked uploading caused crashes under PowerShell ISE. I'm posting a little more about this bug because info about it was scarce on Google, and maybe this will help someone else who has a similar problem.

In order to show upload progress indicators in-place (rather than writing "X % Complete" on a new line over and over again), I use Console.SetCursorPosition to move the cursor back to the beginning of the line and overwrite the old value. It turns out that the PowerShell console in PS ISE isn't a real console; among the differences between the standard terminal and ISE is the fact that ISE doesn't support SetCursorPosition or other cursor operations. Calls to those methods will throw IOExceptions.

PneumaticTube now handles this case by trying to access Console.CursorTop in the constructor of each progress display implementation. If access to CursorTop throws an exception, the progress display classes stop trying to report progress using those methods. This keeps scripts which call PneumaticTube under ISE (or another console which doesn't support those cursor operations) from failing. I also added command line switches for disabling progress reporting entirely as a workaround for other possible console support issues.

If you want to give PneumaticTube a try, you can download it directly from the releases page or install it using chocolatey. Happy uploading!