From: Michael G Schwern Date: 03:05 on 24 Oct 2003 Subject: OS X fighting itself over aliases Aliases or symlinks, the war continues. MacOS introduced the concept of aliases. Infinately better than Windows shortcuts. They posess most of the positive qualities of both hard and soft links. You can move the original file and the alias will still work. It will work across mounted drives. Brilliant! Nearly transparent aliasing! Except a Unix shells has no idea what to make of these things. To the shell its nothing but some crazy empty file. Fortunately the Finder understands symlinks. So if you want to be compatible with both halves of OS X's personality, you have to make a leap backwards and use symlinks. All part of the Unix half of OS X not groking resource forks. :(
From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Date: 03:24 on 24 Oct 2003
Subject: Re: OS X fighting itself over aliases
> All part of the Unix half of OS X not groking resource forks. :(
Actually, the UNIX half handles resource forks reasonably well.
open("filename/rsrc", mode) does the job.
The problem is that the resource fork has the same inode number as
the original file, which freaks out rsync, and you have to hack
things to get it to try that weird file-as-directory trick. I wish
they'd just make the damn things visible.
What UNIX has no handle on at all is finder info. They could make
the finder info show up the same way, which would be halfway there,
or go all the way with ".rsrc" and ".info". But no....
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