As much time as I spend "under the hood" (as opposed to in the 'hood) in OS X, I'm surprised that I haven't encountered this problem before, which is: aliases made in the Finder (with Command-L) are not navigable from the command line. I was shocked. Having need for a quick-and-dirty way to make symbolic links in the GUI, I whipped up the following AppleScript. Copy the following code and paste it into a new Script Editor window.
on open (docpath)
tell application "Finder"
activate
set docpath to docpath as text
set search_string to ":"
set replacement_string to "/"
set oldDelims to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the search_string
set docpath to text items of docpath
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the replacement_string
set docpath to text items of docpath as text
set unixpath to "/Volumes/" & docpath
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the oldDelims
end tell
if last text item of (unixpath as text) is equal to "/" then
set unixpath to (text 1 through ¬
((length of unixpath) - 1) of unixpath)
end if
do shell script "ln -s " & quoted form of unixpath & " " & ¬
quoted form of unixpath & ".sym"
end open
Save the file as a Run Only application (with or without Startup Screen). When you drop a file or folder onto the resulting application, a symbolic link will be made in the same directory as the file, with the extension .sym. I'm sure there are ways to improve on this script (e.g. batch functionality), and I look forward to what other MacOSXHints community has to say.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20061201041424401