Question

Symlinks are different than aliases, although they seem to serve the same purpose (more or less/I think). I need to be able to tell if a file is an alias, and

if [ -h /path/to/file ]

doesn’t work. Is there anything like this for aliases? Google was most unhelpful as aliases are apparently the name for something else in bash altogether.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The Finder stores the information that a file is an alias in the ResourceFork of the file. To read this metadata, I would use spotlight to determine the kind of the file; the following command will return the kind of the file, so you could then compare it in an if-statement.

 mdls -raw -name kMDItemKind /path/to/test.pdf          returns  PDF (Portable Document Format)
 mdls -raw -name kMDItemKind /path/to/test.pdf\ Alias   returns  Alias

An other way would incorporate Applescript, which is executable on the command line via osascript. To return the kind of a file, run:

tell application "Finder" to get kind of ((POSIX file "/path/to/test.pdf\ Alias") as alias)