Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Disadvantage of UNIX' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Disadvantage of UNIX
Authored by: derrickbass on May 03, '04 11:34:12PM

Alas, this is one of the disadvantages of having UNIX under the hood. While it has all sorts of cool features that Mac OS did not have, it is a very old OS and has a lot silly things. Like pathnames. Under UNIX, all of your files and folders are accessed by pathnames; since NetInfo (and /etc/passwd and other login information databases) are of the UNIX heritage, Mac OS X must refer to the location of the home directory as a path. If it were able to use aliases, then this problem would not occur. Aliases store lots of information about the folder they point to (unlike paths) and allow you to rename the folder or move it to a different directory. Morever, aliases know about the concept of volumes, so if the folder is on a volume that is not mounted, you can be prompted to insert it (or, if it is on a disk image, it gets mounted automatically).

Annoyingly, many Cocoa programs also use pathnames to refer to files, even though Cocoa allows access to the alias mechanism. For example, I recently moved some of my iTunes music. iTunes (a Carbon app that refers to files by aliases) had no problem finding the files but iPhoto (a Cocoa app that uses pathnames to locate files) was unable to find any of the music for my slideshows.

Java apps also use pathnames, which can lead to the same sort of situations the poster describes; if they try to store files on an external volume that is not mounted, they will end up creating folders in /Volumes.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Disadvantage of UNIX
Authored by: skellener on May 04, '04 12:04:23AM

Hmmm, but pathnames are also some of Mac OS X's strengths too. In many apps, there are simply pointers to things like image files, or XML files and you can very easily make changes and customize things as you like.

OS X...Best OS on the planet!



[ Reply to This | # ]