Re: Out of Control Aliases?
Re: Out of Control Aliases?
- Subject: Re: Out of Control Aliases?
- From: Alex Zavatone <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:50:46 -0500
They are not necessary.
And this likely happened without any new features being added.
IIRC, part of the aliases are the images of the icons of the original file and as OS X has matured, much larger icon graphics (and many more sizes) have been added to just about every application. This produces copious bloat in each alias and it is not required.
I expect this to be much worse on Lion and Mountain Lion than in Snow Leopard, but as it exists, it easily defeats the purpose of a lightweight reference to the original file.
It's this exact reason why I state that certain parts (this part) of the functionality of Aliases have become a hinderance as opposed to a benefit.
I long for the old days of the desktop db files where this information could be stored so that EVERY alias would not feel the need to carry a duplicate of the original item's icon graphics.
On Nov 12, 2012, at 1:45 PM, Luther Fuller wrote:
> On Nov 10, 2012, at 4:46 PM, I wrote:
>
>> I have an AppleScripted application that constructs a folder in the Users Library/Application Support folder which contains folders containing aliases to folders and also contains some aliases to applications. This folder is installed in the Dock as a folder menu and contains 74 alias files pointing to Finder folders containing Mail messages.
>>
>> I just noticed that the size of this folder = 342.7 MB. In other words, about a third of a GigaByte just to keep track of my mail. This does seem largish.
>
> One more observation.
>
> The alias files discussed above are all about 3.9 MB files. For each of them, there is also an alias file located within the folder '~/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/' within the appropriate .mbox folder that points to the same folder as the alias file in the Dock folder. I wondered if these alias files would also make this folder overly large. I was surprised to find that it was only 80 MB. When I checked on the size of the alias files, I found that each was only 1 MB (1,037,935 bytes). A few were half that size.
>
> I created a new "TEST" mailbox in Mail and created a link to a new folder using my MailWing application. This created two new alias files, one in the Dock menu and one in the '~/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/TEST.mbox' folder. Both had a size of 3.9 MB.
>
> This test was done in Lion (10.7.5). The smaller alias files were made with an earlier OS: 10.4, 10.5, 10.6.
>
> I seems that new features have been added to alias files since OS 10.4, but I haven't the slightest clue about what they are. So, I have to ask … What are these features and are they really necessary?
>
>
>
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