Dropbox Smart Sync : Local/Online

Hello @Xacto - welcome to the forum.

As far as I know, there is no way to use an AppleScript or Terminal command to ‘force’ a file to be online-only or local-only.

However, if you try to ‘read’ the file in Terminal, it will cause Dropbox to download the file locally if it is online only.

So, for example, if you wanted to make ~/Dropbox/Some File Here.pdf local, you could do something like:


cat ~/Dropbox/Some\ File\ Here.pdf >/dev/null 

which will force it to download.

I am not sure this actually helps, but unfortunately the Dropbox app for Mac is not automation friendly at all and never has been. Clearly they don’t think it’s important, unfortunately.