Protecting a file from accidentally being sent.

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 2 May 2018 at 13:19, Owen Thomas <owen.paul.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:

> Maybe I'm mistaken, but I seem to recall that when a Windows (circa 95)
shortcut appeared in a file selection dialogue, the shortcut, and not the
file it referred to was selected.

> It's probably been "fixed" by now. Who knows...

I think that's what happened with 16-bit apps (or Windows NT 3.x apps)
which didn't understand shortcuts.

Symlinks are part of the filesystem, so integrated a lot more deeply into
the OS than shortcuts, which were a Win95 bodge to get around the fact that
FAT didn't support symlinks.

Apple's Aliases were a lot more sophisticated as they included the machine
ID as well -- so an alias could even work over a LAN connection and give
you access to the original file on a different node on the network, even if
that file wasn't on your machine. (Assuming the remote node was turned on,
and you had access rights to it, etc.)

OS X doesn't use aliases much as it's UNIX™ so it has symlinks. Aliases
were a classic MacOS technology.

Anyway, yes, that could happen.

I mainly make symlinks to _folders_ so that, for instance, on my laptop,
although Ubuntu has its own ext4 /home partition, inside my home directory,
~/Documents etc. actually are links to the Windows home directory folders
of the same name. (My Windows drive is much bigger.) Linux can see into a
Windows NTFS drive no problem, whereas getting Windows to open an ext4
drive needs some work.

So whichever OS I boot into, I have the same folders with the same contents.

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