March 2003
Beginner
432 pages
11h 30m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X Hacks
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Aliases, Symlinks, and Hard Links
Poking about with aliases, symlinks, and hard links reveals some interesting entanglements in the merging of the Mac GUI and its Unix underpinnings.
Aliases (shortcuts, if you’re from the Windows world) are indispensable for those of us who insist upon filing things in more than one place or like to have access to particular groupings of applications, files, and whatnot within easy reach. An alias provides a trail of bread crumbs to the original item aliased, keeping track of it no matter where it might reside. It was common in OS 9 to add aliases for your oft-used applications and folders either right on the desktop or in the Apple menu, or, indeed, both. Now, thanks to the Dock and some Dock alternatives [Hack #51], there’s little need to clutter your Apple menu or Desktop with aliases.
That’s not to say that OS X doesn’t have aliases; it does indeed. Simply select a file, folder, application, or whatnot and select File → Make Alias or press
-L (in OS 9 it was
-M, which now, sadly, minimizes the current window instead).
OS X being a hybrid of the Mac and Unix worlds causes some interesting entanglements when it comes to keeping track of the locations of things and their aliases. Mac OS X does a seamless job of glossing over the details. That doesn’t ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.