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Since I updated to macOS 11.5.1 (from Catalina), 'alias' does not work properly. I had an 'alias' to a folder on my desktop which no longer went to the aliased folder, but instead, opened a folder based in my user directory.
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.5
Alias files are an ancient artifact of MacOS, the original one from the 80's. They have several clever features that can go wrong. They aren't well supported in the modern version of macOS.
A better idea would be to use symbolic links. There may be some app that will create them for you. Otherwise, you'll have to use the Terminal.
Safe Mode is not what you think. It simply runs the operating system without most system modifications, both from 3rd party developers and from Apple itself. It will run really slow. It is a good way to see if some 3rd party system modification is changing the behaviour of your system.
Hi Coastalsage,
Thanks for posting in Apple Support Communities.
We understand that your alias folder is no longer routing to the correct folder. Restart your Mac. If this continues, enter safe mode where a check will be run on your start up disk and limited start up items are allowed to run. Get started with the steps in How to use safe mode on your Mac.
Regards
Is the source folder still on your Desktop? If so then make a new alias and verify that it works. Then delete the old alias file.
Alias files lose their links to the source file occasionally so I just create new ones.
There is no change. I even installed 11.5.2
It is also true that I never got into safe mode, although I followed the instructions for my intel processor. I'm assuming that safe mode puts you into a terminal 'window' similar to the way microsoft put you into DOS when in safe mode. Never been in safe mode in macOS.
Coastalsage wrote:
There is no change. I even installed 11.5.2
It is also true that I never got into safe mode, although I followed the instructions for my intel processor. I'm assuming that safe mode puts you into a terminal 'window' similar to the way microsoft put you into DOS when in safe mode. Never been in safe mode in macOS.
It is still worth trying to boot into Safe Mode, it MIGHT cure the problem. Safe Mode does not boot into a terminal window with lines of text like you have seen in Windows; in the MacOS, it boots to the normal desktop but there are small words "Safe Boot" in bright red near the top of the screen, and that also shows up near the end of the booting up. Booting into Safe Mode used to be fairly quick, but it can take a long time now because it is not only clearing out caches, but also running a disk file system check/repair. To do this under the recent versions of MacOS, it checks every snapshot on the disk, and in some cases there may be as many as 24 of those snapshots. Each snapshot can take a minute or so, thus the full Safe Boot can take 10, 15, 20 minutes or more. I have never understood when to release the Shift key when doing a Safe Boot so I simply hold it down until it finishes booting up, which can be a long time. On my 2019 Macbook Pro 16-inch (which has a fast processor) the Safe Boot took maybe 5 minutes or so, but on my 2010 Macbook Air it took more than 20 minutes.
'alias' does not work correctly
