When you work with the command line, you’ll notice that you cannot navigate “into” aliases created with the Finder when in Terminal. For example, you cannot issue a
cd
command into an alias, because Terminal just doesn’t recognize it is such.
From the command line, however, you can use
symbolic links
, the Unix equivalent. While you can create these from Terminal using the
ln -s
command, it is useful to be able to create them from the Finder as well. Here is a simple AppleScript that can do just that.
Paste the following code into a Script Editor window, then save it as an application:
on run
open {choose file with prompt ¬
"Choose a file to create a symbolic link:" without invisibles}
end run
on open the_files
repeat with i from 1 to (count the_files)
try
set posix_path to POSIX path of (item i of the_files)
if posix_path ends with "/" then set posix_path to ¬
text 1 thru -2 of posix_path
do shell script "ln -s " & quoted form of posix_path ¬
& " " & quoted form of (posix_path & ".sym")
end try
end repeat
end open
If you double-click the resulting AppleScript droplet, it will prompt you to select a file; the script will then create a symbolic link in the same folder where the current file is, and you can move that link wherever you want. If you want to create a symbolic link of a folder, just drag the folder onto the droplet; you can also make multiple symbolic links by dragging them on the droplet at the same time. The script adds a .sym extension to the links it creates, so you can spot them easily.