In recent years, particularly as Application Sandboxing was introduced on the Mac, Apple has shifted away from aliases as a developer-facing concept, towards the use of “Bookmark Data”. In the old days, if a developer needed to resolve an alias file on disk, they would use a Carbon function such as FSResolveAliasFile. Instead of resolving to the file on your home volume, it resolves relative to the location on the new volume. ![]() ![]() Click on the alias file and “Show Original” again. Now, copy the whole folder to another volume, for example to a thumb drive or other external drive on your Mac. You should have a folder hierarchy that looks like this:Ĭlick on the “File Alias” item, then choose “File” -> “Show Original” from the Mac menu bar to see how it resolves to the original. To test this: create a Folder in your home folder called “Test”, and a file within it called “File”. ![]() It is similar to a POSIX symbolic link, but whereas a symbolic link references the original by full path, an alias has historically stored additional information about the original so that it stands a chance of being resolved even if the original full path no longer exists.Īn alias, for example, can usually withstand being copied from one volume to another. When a user selects a file in the Mac Finder and chooses File -> Make Alias, the resulting “copy” is a kind of smart reference to the original.
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