For most Unix users, symbolic links are obvious and natural — a means to make connections that span file systems and avoid the need to keep duplicates of files in multiple file system locations.

Symbolic and hard links provide a way to avoid duplicating data on Unix/Linux systems, but the uses and restrictions vary depending on which kind of link you choose to use. Let’s look at how links can ...

For a project, I have a set of "fork" directories which are duplicates of a "baseline" directory, but with some modified and some additional files. A large number of these files in these "fork" ...

When Apple made the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, one of the under-the-hood consequences was that Mac aliases—tiny files that point to other files—lost some functionality. Or to put it more ...

Symbolic links and utilities that delete files Yesterday (Tuesdsay) we covered a report by a reader who described "unexpected" behavior when using a deletion utility to delete a symbolic link -- the ...

You wouldn't know it just by looking, but Mac OS X has two types of aliases. The first are the traditional aliases, which work the same way they do in Mac OS 9. The second type are called symbolic ...

In Unix, a file that points to another file or directory. It is used to allow a variety of sources to point to a common destination. The Windows 2000 counterpart is the "virtual directory." When URLs ...