Aliases and symbolic links in Mac OS X Lion

[AjaxUK]

Hi all,

I've been testing the Lion developer previews and am now using the GM release.

Has anyone else noticed the OS doesn't seem to support symbolic links? All of my symlinks have been converted to aliases and even when I try to create a new symlink it appears as an alias.

The problem here is that preference files that I sync using Dropbox are overwritten as hard files whenever the related app is opened.

This is very annoying as my Dropbox syncing has effectively stopped working.

I can't seem to find anyone else experiencing this problem which is greatly confusing.

 

[brendo234]

I'm experiencing the same problem. Have you found a solution yet?

This is driving me crazy... I use symlinks to point my Pictures/Music/Movies folders in my home directory to an external drive that I use on my PC as well. It worked fine prior to OS X Lion.

Anyone else having this problem?

 

[basher]

No problem here. All works.

 

[jmmo20]

Yep no problems here.. an alias is still an alias (a small file with a reference to a file) and a hard symlink is still there.. a FS-level link.

Just tried creating an alias and a symlink right now and it works.

 

[Tutorer]

I just tested this and so far it works as expected here.

 

[brendo234]

How are you guys going about creating sym links? I'm using the following:

ln -s /Volumes/Data/Videos /Movies

It always gets created as an alias. Am I just doing something wrong?

 

[brand]

How are you guys going about creating sym links? I'm using the following:

ln -s /Volumes/Data/Videos /Movies

It always gets created as an alias. Am I just doing something wrong?

Look at the man page to find out all you ever wanted to know by typing the following command into terminal...

man ln

 

[chrfr]

How are you guys going about creating sym links? I'm using the following:

ln -s /Volumes/Data/Videos /Movies

It always gets created as an alias. Am I just doing something wrong?

Mac OS behavior here is confusing, and it doesn't seem to have changed in 10.7 from 10.6. A symbolic link appears to be an alias in Finder. What do you see when you look at the directory in Terminal?