Working With Aliases

D

drummonds

Registered
I need three things from aliases that I hope exist on my Mac and that you can point me to:
1. I need to be able to copy an alias to a USB drive and have the original file be copied and not the alias. In some cases I am working with directories of many aliases from many locations so opening each alias's original file's directory to copy each original one at a time is cumbersome.
2. I need to protect the original files from deletion once they have been aliased. It would be nice if MacOS would warm before delete with a dialog box saying, "this file has aliases, are you sure you want to delete?"
3. I need a way to find all the aliases for a file.

Are any of these possible on Snow Leopard?

Thanks,
Scott
 
1) Ain't gonna happen. A link is an actual file itself, so copying the link copies the file that is the link itself, not the files that the link "points" to. A simple terminal script would be able to do this, though.

2) It is difficult (if not impossible) to manipulate the original file(s) by manipulating the alias(es). In Mac OS X, if you delete the original files that have aliases, then you end up with broken aliases.

3) http://serverfault.com/questions/31653/list-all-symbolic-links-on-a-unix-system

Perhaps your usage of aliases in Mac OS X would be better suited (as you can tackle some of your three issues) using true UNIX-style hard links instead of symbolic links.
 
Under MacOS 9, there were archiving utilities that could replace the alias with the actual file, but I have not seen that functionality in a MacOS X utility.
 
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