A suggestion for alias and symbolic links, and a request
A suggestion for alias and symbolic links, and a request
- Subject: A suggestion for alias and symbolic links, and a request
- From: Thomas Lachand-Robert <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 23:50:36 +0200
A few days ago I suggested the following about the problem of the (absence
of) relation between aliases and symbolic links:
A useful improvement to aliases would be to have them recognized as
symbolic links by the Unix tools. If I understand well the machinery, it
should not be very difficult:
-- Aliases doesn't need to have data fork, they appear as 0-sized files
in the terminal.
-- Symbolic links doesn't have any resource fork, the path is coded in
their data fork.
So a simple solution would be to have all aliases copying the path they
already store inside their data fork, in addition to their resource fork.
I haven't have any comment on this mechanism, so I guess most people think
it would work. I will file a feature request to Apple when I get time
(that is, not before the week-end :-(.)
Anyway, Apple will not do anything for some months, so I have a request to
all willing people on both lists: create a small tool (command-line and/or
drag-n-drop) that does exactly that: from an already existing alias, add a
data fork containing the path in the alias, and set the bit for it to have
it recognized as a symbolic link. I would do myself if I had competence
and time, both of them I lack of in this case (you have to know Carbon to
dig in the alias format and find the path; and to know in Unix how put the
flag for symbolic links).
Should some clever guy do that, I'm pretty sure that would accelerate
things on Apple's side, to incorporate directly in Finder. This would
permit to test the idea for real, and I have seen many cases in the past
where Apple made some change to the system to incorporate features found
in popular utilities.
Thomas Lachand-Robert
********************** email@hidden
<< Et le chemin est long du projet ` la chose. >> Molihre, Tartuffe.
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