Remapping Safari bookmarks

[zerkour]

I work for a school district, and we use DeepFreeze (www.faronics.com) to lock down all the lab stations... we're running 10.4 on blue iMacs.
For those of you not familiar with DeepFreeze, it "freezes" the computer so that, while you may make any change you want to the computer, it resets it on reboot to whatever state it was in before the admin "froze" it. What we would like to do is somehow get the Safari bookmarks folder (or ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist) moved to our "Thawspace" (a drive mounted on the desktop where the users can safely save files, without being deleted on reboot). Does anyone have any idea how to do this?
I was thinking about trying this (SymbolicLinker).

PS: Basically, the idea is to let the teachers add bookmarks without us (as admins) needing to come in and "thaw" all the computers in the lab.

Edit: I would like to do this with as little command line work as possible; while I am quite comfortable with it (even though I'm not as familiar with it as I'd like), my fellow techs would rather not use it.

 

[tersono]

A simple alias won't work, but I think you're headed in the right direction with a symlink. I've not tried this particular situation personally, but it should work.

If you're not comfortable in the terminal, there's an automator action here that... errrm.... 'automates' *grin* for you

 

[zerkour]

thanks for the suggestion tersono...

Ok. Using SymbolicLinker worked. I had to symlink the whole Safari folder, instead of just the Bookmarks.plist file. But it works... now, I just need to figure out how to make it so teachers can modify the bookmarks, but not allow them or students to delete the whole Safari folder... hmm...

 

[zerkour]

Ok. Using SymbolicLinker worked. I had to symlink the whole Safari folder, instead of just the Bookmarks.plist file. But it works... now, I just need to figure out how to make it so teachers can modify the bookmarks, but not allow them or students to delete the whole Safari folder... hmm...

Ok. So i figured out how to hide folders (so the students cant see it to delete it... something I really should've known) using the terminal:

cd /Volumes/THAWSPACE/
mv Safari .Safari

But, I'm getting hung up with creating a symbolic link to the hidden folder. If I type:

ln -s .Safari Safari

The link gets created in the volume Thawspace, but if I try to move the Safari folder back to the user's library, it somehow breaks during that move. Even if I point the "ln -s" command to the user library, it still doesn't work. It was working before with a symbolic link, but now hiding it creates this whole new problem. Any suggestions? Am I going about this completely wrong?

 

[zerkour]

But, I'm getting hung up with creating a symbolic link to the hidden folder. If I type:

ln -s .Safari Safari

The link gets created in the volume Thawspace, but if I try to move the Safari folder back to the user's library, it somehow breaks during that move. Even if I point the "ln -s" command to the user library, it still doesn't work. It was working before with a symbolic link, but now hiding it creates this whole new problem. Any suggestions? Am I going about this completely wrong?

Ok. Figured it all out... what i was doing when i wrote "ln -s .Safari Safari" was totally wrong. It was pointing to .Safari, even when moved to the Library folder. (it wasnt keeping the directory)
So, when I used:

ln -s /Volumes/THAWSPACE/.Safari /Users/user/Library/Safari

it all worked out ok. Yay!