#Mac symboliclinker mac os
#Mac symboliclinker software

Next, remove the existing Downloads folder (make sure it is empty first). I did this by copying my old Downloads folder from the previous system drive (moved to an external drive enclosure) to the new internal hard drive so it could be found at /Volumes/Bucket/Downloads (“Bucket” is the name of my hard drive). First step is to make sure that the destination folder is in place. Steps to Create a Symlink Here are the steps to create a symlink for the ~/Downloads folder. Be careful when working with your ~/Library folder, but you may find some large folders that could be better off moved elsewhere. Steam stores game files down inside the Library as well. My Mail folder is about 10GB, for example. Mail keeps all your messages inside ~/Library/Mail/ which can grow to be quite large if you have a several email accounts and a lot of email correspondence. The data files could be a different story. The preferences files are generally small, but are read each time an application launches. The user library (~/Library) contains application preferences, settings, and data. The ~/Library folder ~/Library deserves some discussion because the contents of this folder are both critically important and not very well understood. You can use the “~/” notation and you will be sure to refer to your own current user folder. So “~/Downloads” would be the same as “~/Users/jack/Downloads” in our example. The notation “~/Downloads” refers to the Downloads folder inside the current user’s home folder. It is the same as entering “/Users/jack” if the short name of the current user account were “jack” on that machine. The “~/” notation, used frequently in the steps below is a shortcut to the current user’s home folder. I then used symlinks to replace some of the default sub-folders with pointers to a location on the secondary hard drive. On installation, OS X created my home folder in the default location on the boot drive, which is the SSD. The system expects to find those directories inside the user’s home folder. The Home Folder The User folder in OS X contains several important sub-folders for different types of content. Be sure to use the “-s” switch when you enter the “ln” commands. You can on Wikipedia, but we don’t want to use them here.

A Note on Hard Links The “ln” command below is used to create hard links. However, symlinks work at a low-level such that almost all applications and OS features will follow them to the target. If you move the target file, the symlink will break because it still points to the original location in the link. These files simply contain the path of the target file or directory stored as text.

#Mac symboliclinker mac os

Symbolic Links (or symlinks) Symbolic Links are an older feature that harken back to the BSD roots of Mac OS X. Unfortunately, you may have noticed that some applications do not follow aliases properly.

The alias is tied to the unique ID of that file and will continue to work even if you move the original file or folder because it stores this information (and more) in the resource fork of the alias file. They are a pointer to a file or a folder somewhere else, even on a server. SymbolicLinker does this by adding a contextual menu item to the Finder that generates symbolic links to the selected files.Īliases were introduced in Mac OS System 7 and were then carried forward to Mac OS X.

#Mac symboliclinker software

SymbolicLinker is a tiny contextual menu plugin (for Puma through Leopard users) and software service (for Snow Leopard & later users) that, once installed, allows any user to Create symbolic links to files inside the Finder. Re: Mac Users FAQ - Helpful Information Post by Knux2007 » Wed 10:05 pm Thanks for that FoF file for 10.3 users, but I still can't put songs into the songs folder, and SymbolicLinker for some reason opens random apps when I try to use it. There are Command line ways to create symbolic links, but if you’d rather not get your hands dirty with that, you can use a good old Automator hack to create dropbox symbolic links for you. A Mac alias of a file sometimes will not be enough.