Re: How to de-alias aliases when copying

In article <y9dy7cutc28.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
William Mitchell <mitchell@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

I have a folder full of aliases to files on my hard disk. I want to
copy this folder to a USB drive (or whatever), but replace the aliases
with the files they point to, as they won't be much use on somebody
else's machine. Is there an easy way to do that?

A straight Finder copy doesn't do it; cp, ditto, cpio and pax don't do
it, and i couldn't find flags to make them do it [1].

I'm on 10.4.


If you insert a blank (unwritten) CD into your Mac, open its window, and
then drag files into that window, you'll notice that the files you
dragged are still where they were, and the CD window contains only
aliases to them.

If you then click the "Burn" button on the CD window, the files
themselves are of course burned to the CD, not the aliases.

So, if you drag some of your own previously created aliases to the CD
window (or maybe copy/paste some already created aliases into the
window) and do a similar burn, will you get the actual files or not?

I don't know -- just haven't gotten around to trying it.
.