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Full Discussion: A challenging problem involving symbolic links.
Top Forums Programming A challenging problem involving symbolic links. Post 302177731 by ibloom on Sunday 23rd of March 2008 12:48:02 AM
Old 03-23-2008
A challenging problem involving symbolic links.
Hello,

I'm working on an application that bridges together several applications involved in creating a video workflow for editing with digital cinema cameras. The main platform is MacOSX.

Because of the nature of some of the utilities for working with this video footage I must spoof filenames by using symbolic links to essentially rename files. This hack works great most of the time, but on some systems (possibly Leopard systems) it runs into problems, I've isolated them into two:

In some situations, a symbolically linked file won't be recognized by a program, and won't appear in the softwares non-cocoa file selector. But other times it does. A system reboot will often remedy the problem, but I seek a way to check for this for users of my bridge.

The second is sometimes the program will load a symbolic link, but it will refer to it by a /Volume path only. So for example it will refer to the path to the symbolic link as /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/Username/Desktop etc. instead of /Users/Username/Desktop ... etc. Again, only in some situation not in all. (I believe mostly on Leopard, but I'm not certain yet)

Looking to gain a deeper understanding of how symbolic links are processed by the system. Thanks in advance for any insights.

IBloom
 

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LEARN ABOUT CENTOS

git-symbolic-ref

GIT-SYMBOLIC-REF(1)						    Git Manual						       GIT-SYMBOLIC-REF(1)

NAME

       git-symbolic-ref - Read, modify and delete symbolic refs

SYNOPSIS

       git symbolic-ref [-m <reason>] <name> <ref>
       git symbolic-ref [-q] [--short] <name>
       git symbolic-ref --delete [-q] <name>

DESCRIPTION

       Given one argument, reads which branch head the given symbolic ref refers to and outputs its path, relative to the .git/ directory.
       Typically you would give HEAD as the <name> argument to see which branch your working tree is on.

       Given two arguments, creates or updates a symbolic ref <name> to point at the given branch <ref>.

       Given --delete and an additional argument, deletes the given symbolic ref.

       A symbolic ref is a regular file that stores a string that begins with ref: refs/. For example, your .git/HEAD is a regular file whose
       contents is ref: refs/heads/master.

OPTIONS

       -d, --delete
	   Delete the symbolic ref <name>.

       -q, --quiet
	   Do not issue an error message if the <name> is not a symbolic ref but a detached HEAD; instead exit with non-zero status silently.

       --short
	   When showing the value of <name> as a symbolic ref, try to shorten the value, e.g. from refs/heads/master to master.

       -m
	   Update the reflog for <name> with <reason>. This is valid only when creating or updating a symbolic ref.

NOTES

       In the past, .git/HEAD was a symbolic link pointing at refs/heads/master. When we wanted to switch to another branch, we did ln -sf
       refs/heads/newbranch .git/HEAD, and when we wanted to find out which branch we are on, we did readlink .git/HEAD. But symbolic links are
       not entirely portable, so they are now deprecated and symbolic refs (as described above) are used by default.

       git symbolic-ref will exit with status 0 if the contents of the symbolic ref were printed correctly, with status 1 if the requested name is
       not a symbolic ref, or 128 if another error occurs.

GIT

       Part of the git(1) suite

Git 1.8.3.1							    06/10/2014						       GIT-SYMBOLIC-REF(1)
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