[headbirth]

Can anyone tell me why aliases are so big? can they be made smaller?

[Art Vandelay]

Aliases and symlinks are not the same thing. Aliases can track a file as it changes names or locations. Symlinks can not. That is why aliases are bigger. I doubt you can make them smaller without breaking them.

[Brass]

Symbolic links merely contain a pathname to the original file and that's it.

An alias contains the HFS file index for the original file, and optionally can contain the pathname as well (depending on how it is created). This file index doesn't change when a file is moved, which is why an alias has the different behaviour to symbolic links.

I've no idea why an alias needs to be that large. I don't really know much about HFS and file index formats but I wouldn't have thought they'd be 40k!

Maybe someone with a bit more knowledge of HFS specifications can offer some insight?

[Art Vandelay]

I do know that they also have icon data, whereas symlinks do not That could be a source of the increased data size.

[wadesworld]

Holy anal retentiveness!

It's 48K man...find something better to spend your time worrying about.

Wade

[Geobunny]

That brings me to a different question: when did iTunes in OS X stop using HFS+ file index references and start using absolute paths instead?

I used to be able to move files around while being used (in almost any Mac app actually) and the location of any music files I moved while iTunes was open would be remembered at their new locations. However yesterday I installed a new Hard drive and moved (ie, held down command while dragging, not copy then delete) all my music onto that new drive. iTunes is now horribly silent It's lost track of ALL my music!

I suppose it's possible that the Finder's semantics for the 'move' action has changed, but that still doesn't alter the fact that it's very annoying.

[headbirth]

Thanks guys for the info, was wondering why aliases were eating up my drive space.

Go back to wadesworld and stop wasting my time, haven't you got anything better to do?

[Moose]

Originally posted by Geobunny:
That brings me to a different question: when did iTunes in OS X stop using HFS+ file index references and start using absolute paths instead?

I used to be able to move files around while being used (in almost any Mac app actually) and the location of any music files I moved while iTunes was open would be remembered at their new locations. However yesterday I installed a new Hard drive and moved (ie, held down command while dragging, not copy then delete) all my music onto that new drive. iTunes is now horribly silent It's lost track of ALL my music!

I suppose it's possible that the Finder's semantics for the 'move' action has changed, but that still doesn't alter the fact that it's very annoying.

You moved the files, yes. But to a different volume. HFS(+) file IDs can't be guaranteed to be the same when you move files to a different volume.

That said, I don't know if iTunes uses them anymore.