Re: [MacPerl] dropping aliases on droplets

["Jay Bedsole" <rwdd30@email.sps.mot.com>]

Rich writes:

> As a test, I tried dropping an alias on it.  To my surprise, the
> name that got printed was the name of the item that the alias
> referenced! This surprised me no end.  Worse, I see no way to get
> back from the name I received to the name of the alias.

Yes, Matthias and I had a discussion off-line about this and he
convinced me that this is the right behavior. Incidentally, it's
not a MacPerl thing - perl does basically the same thing on a
unix box. I just wanted to do a simple file test, but there's an
interesting side effect of this behavior. If the alias is to a file
on a remote AppleShare volume, the volume is mounted (which plays
havoc, user interface-wise, when you're processing a whole disk
with about 40 volume aliases all asking you to login). I had to do
(what I thought was) an ugly workaround with a -l test on each file
before I did anything else...

> Comments, workarounds, etc, are solicited...

Maybe there's some Mac trick, but I doubt it. I think the alias is
resolved by the Mac OS, and once resolved, I doubt there is any
way back to the "actual" alias file. Let me know if you figure it
out, though - there's been a couple of occasions where I'd like to
work on the alias file, not the file pointed to...

jay

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