There is always a different way to do it.

-Mark

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Along these lines, what I'd really like is the ability to work with Smart Folders from the command line. I would want to be able to ls them, cd into them, and cp from them.

Do you want Unix programs to be able to follow them? Do you want 'find' and all the others to be able to read files with an alias in the path you give? Do you want 'zip' to be able to store and recreate them? And so on.

The only way to handle aliases properly would be to build them in at the filesystem level, and provide versions of all the standard IO library calls which could follow or not follow them, as appropriate -- the same as has already been done for symbolic links. That's a big, big change. And anything short of that is going to cause strange behaviour at some points, where the aliases fail to work.

---
Andy/

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On July 22 I submitted treating aliases of directories like symbolic links to directories in the Terminal as a request to Apple on their Webradar site for ADC members.

The case was closed on August 20. "This enhancement request has been forwarded to the appropriate engineering team for review and consideration."

I can only hope that this engineer finds a nice way to make this default behavior for the Terminal in OS X.

Unless Tiger's bash is different than every other bash I've used, the bit in parens is incorrect. Functions aren't passed to subshells, and .bash_profile isn't run by subshells, only .bashrc is. So if you put the function declaration in your .bash_profile, it won't work, for example, if you drop into a subshell from vi using the :sh command. The function won't be defined, so you'll get the regular old cd.

The hint itself is great, just put it in your .bashrc, not your .bash_profile.

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ln -s "/Users/John/Documents/School Files/Archives/stuff" "/Users/John/Shortcut File"

The point of this hint is not to replace aliases with symbolic links. obviously you could just make a choice to never make aliases and always create symbolic links instead, in which case this hint would be moot.

The author is trying to address the more common scenario where you are working in the shell on a machine where aliases are already existing (likely in any Mac OS X environment where the finder is being used).

Sure you can just try to never use the alias functionality of the Finder (though it is in fact in many ways superior to symbolic links), but if you want to use aliases AND be able to navigate them in the shell, what do you do? This is the issue the hint is trying to address, and does so quite well.

How would one do this in tcsh? Not everyone is a bash fan. :-)

---
--
Stanton McCandlish
Director, Technology Standards
Integrity Incorporated

This is a great hint. Thanks for this.

I wanted to modify this so i could run it on any mac i encounter whether I have been able to install the c-code above or not, so I decided to use a related hint* to replace the getTruePath portion of the code.

# teach shell to treat aliases like symbolic links rather than files
function cd {
	if [ ${#1} == 0 ]; then
		builtin cd
	elif [[ -d "${1}" || -L "${1}" ]]; then	# regular link or directory
		builtin cd "${1}"
	elif [ -f "${1}" ]; then	# file: is it an alias?
		# Redirect stderr to dev null to suppress OSA environment errors
		exec 6>&2 # Link file descriptor 6 with stderr so we can restore stderr later
		exec 2>/dev/null # stderr replaced by /dev/null
		path=$(osascript << EOF
tell application "Finder"
set theItem to (POSIX file "${1}") as alias
if the kind of theItem is "alias" then
get the posix path of ((original item of theItem) as text)
end if
end tell
EOF
)
		exec 2>&6 6>&-      # Restore stderr and close file descriptor #6.
		
		if [ "$path" == '' ];then # probably not an alias, but regular file
			builtin cd "${1}"	# will trigger regular shell error about cd to regular file
		else	# is alias, so use the returned path of the alias
			builtin cd "$path"
		fi
	else	# should never get here, but just in case.
		builtin cd "${1}"
	fi
}

I put this in my .bash_profile, which I have checked in to a CVS repository. Then, from any Mac that I am working on, I simply check out my bash environment and either source it or overwrite the current .bash_profile. This gives me instant access from anywhere to all the modification I make to my bash environment.

Thanks to the original authors and developers of the hint(s) this is based on. I hope someone finds this useful.

(Unfortunately, using it at first was triggering these messages:
CFLog (21): dyld returns 2 when trying to load /Library/ScriptingAdditions/QXPScriptingAdditions.osax/Contents/MacOS/QXPScriptingAdditions
so that's why I had to supress the errors.)

____________________
* A script to reveal alias paths in the Terminal