What she is talking about is a misspelled form of the
expression "symlink" which is short for "symbolic link."
I will briefly quote wikipedia after having entered
"symbolic link" from Google:
Symbolic link
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In computing, a symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) is a special
type of file that contains a reference to another file or directory in
the form of an absolute or relative path and that affects pathname
resolution.^[1] Symbolic links were already present by 1978 in
mini-computer operating systems from DEC and Data General's RDOS. Today
they are supported by the POSIX operating-system standard, most
Unix-like operating systems such as FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X,
and also Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista, Windows 7 and
to some degree in Windows 2000 and Windows XP in the form of Shortcut
files.
End of quote
Your Mac's are loaded with them.
You are free to use symlinks anywhere you might use a
regular file as long as you understand what they are.
Here is a common example. On your Mac, you have
AppleFileServer. It is normally found in /usr/sbin. Since Apple
may choose to update this file during upgrades or security bug
fixes, and they sure want to keep straight which version they
are dealing with, the actual file on the disk may have a longer
name or a totally different name all together.
I invoked the terminal on a mac and found some links,
one of which I will list for you as a demonstration. You can do
the same on your Mac's from the terminal window:
Sun Sep 9 06:31:20 2012
bash-3.2$ ls -l /usr/sbin/AppleFileServer
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 79 Nov 19 2010 /usr/sbin/AppleFileServer ->
/System/Library/CoreServices/AppleFileServer.app/Contents/MacOS/AppleFileServer
In that case, the file has the same name as the link,
but it is located in a rather long path. Tomorrow, Apple might
decide you need a new AppleFileServer and decide it should go in
a different location on your system. This could break lots of
stuff which would then need to be fixed but, instead, Apple just
re-makes the symlink and points it to the new location and
nobody is the wiser. All the software knows that AppleFileServer
is in /usr/sbin and that's all they need to be aware of.
I have a special file at work containing information
everybody needs to know in my group and everybody has a symlink
in their home directory pointing to this file. If I change that
one file, it's changed for everybody without having to update 15
or 20 separate files.
Getting back to something Sarah mentioned, a symlink is
not a copy but more like a nick name. If you trash the actual
file contents, every symlink now points to rubbish, also. If you
have permission to write to a symlink, you also are writing to
the original file because symlinks are nothing more than
alternative locations and names for one and only one version of
a file.
If you delete the file that symlinks point to, the
symlinks are still there and you will think you can use them,
but when you try, you will get the error of "file not found" or
something similar.
Anyway, I hope I didn't confuse things even more, but
symlinks are powerful but you must use them with care.
You can delete a symlink without deleting the original
file so, in that one case, they can protect the actual contents
of a valuable file.
"Mrs. Lynnette Annabel Smith" writes:
> Sarah
>
> You didn't answer his question I'm afraid. Let me try to make it a little
> easier.
>
> 1. What is SimLink?
>
> 2. From where can one obtain SimLink?
>
> I don't really understand the instructions either, to be honest. Could
> you, or somebody, clarify?
>
> Thank you.
>
> Lynne
=======================================
The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and
worm-free
To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web
pages located at
http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat
You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group at
either of the following websites:
http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html
Or:
<http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]>
you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at:
<http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml>
---------------------------------------
