In my Finder windows I have numerous aliases that point mostly to other folders. When in the Terminal, these aliases present as regular files. How can I get the target of an alias so that I can perform some operation, e.g., "cd", on the target?
MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)
If you do a normal ls -al on the item then the item the alias points to will be displayed, like so:
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root wheel 11 Apr 3 2014 tmp -> private/tmp
Thanx, but no. What you describe is how a symbolic link presents. Note the initial "l" in the output. As I said, the Alias presents as a regular file. I want to somehow process this file to learn the target.
If you mean an Apple alias, then select it's file icon. Press COMMAND-I to open the Get Info window. There should be a link to display the target.
A Finder alias is unlike the Unix variety, the Finder alias is actually a binary file which contains information concerning the file. One of the pieces of information is of course the location of the original but there is no way to resolve that location outside of the Finder.
Actually there is no Apple supplied way, there are programs out there that will do this but as the file format can change between versions of OS X and Finder there is no guarantee that what works at on point will continue to work.
Depending on what you are doing you might be abel to get the original file using a small Applescript run from within your shell script.
regards
<edit>
this is one of the sites that have a binary http://sebastien.kirche.free.fr/python_stuff/MacOS-aliases.txt and other useful information. Again as this stuff canned does change not sure how accurate it currently is.
Thanx, but, again, no. As I said, I'm working in the Terminal, so am looking for a command-line command that I can enter that will extract for me the target of the alias.
Thanx, Frank. We're on the same page. Indeed, the "strings" command shows me that the target is in there, but how to extract it properly? If AppleScript can do it for me, then the question becomes what is the AppleScript command to do such? From the command prompt the "osascript" command could invoke the AppleScript to return the target back to the shell, which would work for me. Any ideas on the AppleScript to do such?
This AppleScript demonstrates how to resolve the OS X alias and return a POSIX path for it
set af to choose file
tell application "Finder"
if the kind of af is "alias" then
set origFile to the POSIX path of ((original item of af) as text)
end if
end tell
display dialogorigFile
Thanx, Frank! I think I can make that work. Have to (somehow) pass in the file name to the AppleScript from the shell variable ($1) containing the name of the alias file, but I'm pretty sure I've seen how to do that somewhere.
Actually, I jumped the gun a bit. I got the filename ("CUSO") into the "af" variable, but the line
if the kind of af is "alias" thengenerates the following error:
66:73: execution error: Can’t get kind of "CUSO". (-1728)Something like this should work for you
#!/bin/sh
aPath=$(osascript << EOF
tell application "Finder"
set theItem to (POSIX file "${1}") as alias
if the kind of theItem is "alias" then
get the posix path of ((original item of theItem) as text)
end if
end tell
EOF
)
echo $aPath
Takes the alias file path as its argument
sets aPath to the original file
regards
It requires the full path to the alias file not just the alias file name.
for example
pandora.local ~/Development % ./alias.sh ~/Library/Favorites/Xcode
/Applications/Xcode.app
pandora.local
~/Development %
Works great. Thanx, again! (Not sure why Apple didn't supply a command to do this directly. They seem to have provided many other commands to interact between the two environments, e.g., the "pasteboard", Spotlight, AppleScript.)
Glad it helped
regards
Given an alias created by the Finder, from the Unix prompt (e.g., in Terminal) how can I get the target of the alias?