Re: [MacPerl] dropping aliases on droplets

["Paul J. Schinder" <schinder@pobox.com>]

On Mon, 07 Sep 1998 17:49:25 +0000, Jay Bedsole wrote:
>
>Paul writes:
>
>> The obvious thing to do is to populate @ARGV some other way
>> than dropping files on a droplet. Perl can deal with symbolic
>> links just fine once it knows their paths.
>
>Well, I'm unconvinced. Here's why. First, in the example I was
>thinking of there were no dropped files, I used FSpIterateDirectory

I really wish I understood why people use Mac specific routines in their
scripts when generic Perl routines exist that do the same job, like
readdir() and File::Find. In this case you want to use plain text paths to
avoid having links resolved. I'm no expert on this, but I believe
internally MacOS uses FSSpecs instead of paths, so I'd guess any MacOS
specific routine will generate an FSSpec that points at the actual file
rather than the alias The fact remains, if you try -l, Istat(),
readlink(), etc. on the path to an alias, they all work as advertised. If
you use File::Find or readdir(), you get back either full paths or names,
both completely unresolved.

>and it resolved the symbolic links. OK, not conclusive, but then I
>tried simple file tests on a hard coded path to one of my alias
>files. The -l returns true, but -f is clearly acting on the file
>pointed to by the alias... I tried several kinds of file access
>operations and they all acted on the pointed-to file, not the alias
>file... Though, none of my experiments included Mac I/O toolbox
>calls, so I'll stop just short of saying you're wrong... [wink]

That's the way it's supposed to work. That's the way it works under Unix.
I'd suggest a litte more reading of docs and experimenting on your part
before passing any judgements. "man stat" on your local Unix box is a good
place to start.

>
>jay
>
>

-------
Paul J. Schinder
schinder@pobox.com


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