drive

drive command [options] [path]

drive is a command-line client for Google Drive that deliberately borrows Git's model: you pull and push rather than letting a daemon sync in the background. Nothing moves until you say so, which is the whole appeal for anyone who has watched an automatic sync client propagate a mistake.`drive init` creates a context directory (`.gd/`) that marks a local folder as the root of a Drive mirror, much as `.git/` marks a repository. Subsequent commands compare local state against the remote and report what would change; `drive diff` shows the differences without transferring anything.Note that its flags are Go-style single-dash long options: `-force`, `-no-prompt`, `-depth`, not `--force`. This trips up people who expect GNU conventions.

init

Initialize drive context in directory.

Download files from Google Drive.

Upload files to Google Drive.

List files and directories.

Show differences between local and remote.

Move files to trash.

Restore files from trash.

Permanently delete files.

Apply operation to all files.

Force operation without confirmation.

Disable confirmation prompts.

Limit directory traversal depth.

The project is effectively dormant: the last upstream commit was in early 2024, and Google's Drive API and OAuth requirements have continued to move. New installations often stumble on OAuth setup, which now expects you to register your own client credentials in a Google Cloud project rather than use a bundled key.For most people rclone is the better tool today: it is actively maintained, handles Drive alongside dozens of other backends, supports server-side copies and encryption, and has a far more capable sync engine.There is no conflict resolution to speak of. When a file has changed on both sides, drive asks, and `-force` simply overwrites, so a careless push can discard remote edits. Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides are not real files and cannot be pulled as-is; they must be exported to a concrete format.

drive was written by Emmanuel Odeke in 2015, at a time when Google shipped no official Drive client for Linux at all and the alternatives were FUSE mounts that tended to hang. Its Git-like explicit push/pull model was a direct reaction to the automatic sync clients on other platforms, and it earned a large following on that basis. It has since been overtaken by rclone, which covers the same ground and much more.

rclone(1), gdrive(1), rsync(1), git(1)

Source code