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Re: Another question about links
Authored by: Anonymous on Mar 30, '01 06:21:05AM

The Mac OS X Finder displays the Softlink as an Alias to the GUI-User. Its still just a softlink. (Mac OS 9.0.4 didn't recognize softlinks as anything useful, I don't know if Mac OS 9.1 does. In fact, when Public Beta was booted under Classic Mac OS, you could open a soft-link with a text-editor like Alpha and it contained just the full UNIX-Path of the Destination)

On the other hand an Alias is a special file, too, but the data is stored in the resource fork. BSD doesnt make any use of that data, thus the file appears empty (0 bytes). If you format your partitions with UFS you might always get softlinks, I don't really know.
However, traditional alias files have the advantage that they don't break if the target file/folder is moved to another directory.



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Re: Another question about links
Authored by: Anonymous on Mar 31, '01 12:07:26AM

The dichotomy about aliases created in the Finder verses BSD slinks also allows aliases created in OS X to work in OS 9 - nice if you switch back and forth from X to 9. But the dock not recognizing aliases while recognizing slinks is definately a bug in my book.

Jim



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