On 4/10/22 10:49 pm, 2qdxy4rzwzuui...@potatochowder.com wrote:
(I could even move the file to another folder on the original Mac, but that didn't mean much, because those old file systems were entirely flat (directories and folders were an illusion maintained by the Finder)
That was only true in the very early days. A proper hierarchical file system was available as soon as hard disks became common (around the Mac II era I think?) However, internally each file on a volume was identified by a File ID (something a bit like an inode number) and that was stored in the alias and used as the first means of finding the file. There was also a pathname stored in the alias, but that was only used as a backup in case the file couldn't be found using the File ID. So a Mac alias was in some ways more powerful than a symlink, but in other ways less -- e.g. there was no equivalent to a relative symlink. Also aliases are more like a Windows shortcut in that they aren't resolved automatically in the kernel -- programs need to be aware of them and take explicit action to resolve them. Things are even more confusing in MacOSX, which has both aliases *and* symlinks, they behave differently, and the Finder doesn't tell you which you're looking at. :-( -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
