Re: [MacPerl] dropping aliases on droplets

[Matthias Ulrich Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>]

"Jay Bedsole" <rwdd30@email.sps.mot.com> writes:
>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.

My as well, since this is behavior that I thought I had specifically fixed a
few releases ago (Before system 7.5.3, the finder would resolve all alias
files, later versions can disable this behavior). I'll have to dig a bit deeper
to find that bug.

>> Worse, I see no way to get
>> back from the name I received to the name of the alias.

Right. That's an impossibility, since alias->file mappings are not bijective.

>Yes, Matthias and I had a discussion off-line about this and he
>convinced me that this is the right behavior.

I don't quite think that we were talking about quite the same thing that Rich
noticed. What is true is that most Perl file operations resolve aliases, except
for lstat, -l, readlink, rename, and unlink.

Matthias

-----
Matthias Neeracher   <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>   http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~neeri
   "These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can 
    even aspire to crudeness." -- William Gibson, _Johnny Mnemonic_

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