In article <3e672bb9@news.povray.org>, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> 
wrote:

>   Actually there are two types of links in Unix: Hard links and soft links.

An alias is a bit of both. You can move the target around or rename it 
and it stays attached, but if you delete the file, it breaks. If you 
replace it with another file with the same name, the alias directs to 
the new file.
Hard and soft links are supported as usual, but you can't create them 
from the Finder.


>   From the point of view of applications, they don't see any difference
> between files, hard or soft links (unless the specifically ask the system
> with a specialized system call).

I don't know if aliases are implemented like this. An attempt to open an 
alias with the standard C code may attempt to open the actual alias 
file, not its target. To properly written Mac programs they behave like 
the target itself would, though.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

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