Changing 'Scripts/*.exe'

[Greg Ewing]

On 4/10/22 10:49 pm, 2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE at 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