Re: NSFileManager and aliases
Re: NSFileManager and aliases
- Subject: Re: NSFileManager and aliases
- From: Thomas Lachand-Robert <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 23:13:05 +0200
Le mardi 16 avril 2002, ` 08:38 , Alex Curylo a icrit :
Well, IMHO this I-want-aliases-to-act-like-symlinks rather misses the
point.
Aliases are for when you want to keep track of a particular file no matter
where it gets itself to behind your back, like in a media repository a la
the iTunes library for instance. Your examples of why aliases suck are
based
on the completely different theory of wanting to keep track of a location
no
matter what file happens to show up there, which is the job of a symlink.
So
keep file ids for the one, and paths for the other, and use the right tool
for the task at hand.
I didn't suggest that aliases should act like s-links. That's something
different: the aliases would have an ADDITIONAL data fork (it's currently
empty for any alias I know) containing the original path of the aliased
file as a Unix symbolic link. Hence aliases would continue to work as
aliases for any app which is alias aware (Finder to start with, and any
Carban app, and, I hope, any Cocoa app in a near future).
But for all those nifty Unix tools coming from foreign areas, which will
never understand aliases, they would appear as s-links; for the time being
they just appear as 0-sized files, which is plain useless. Obviously, for
aliases to unmounted volumes, and aliases to moved files, this would not
work anyway. But that would be much better than a null file. Even here it
could be useful in a simple 'ls -l'; I would prefer to see
lrwxrw-rw- 1 tlr staff 12 Apr 16 23:03 myalias ->
/path/to/file
than
-rwxrw-rw- 1 tlr staff 0 Apr 16 23:03 myalias
(I don't think that the volume need to be mounted, because s-link are just
the string for the path.)
So I believe this wouldn't break anything, but only add new
functionalities; power-user would benefit, but also ordinary users as the
use of 'pure' Unix apps become more common on OS X.
P.S: Also maybe Unix could evolve, and extend s-links functionality to
track files to unmounted volumes, too.
Thomas Lachand-Robert
********************** email@hidden
<< Et le chemin est long du projet ` la chose. >> Molihre, Tartuffe.
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