Nov 14, 2010 - First of all, I wonder if the 1 MB is correct: true, Finder's Show Info tells you this, but in Terminal the file sizes are always just half of that. You have several options for creating an alias: Drag and drop: Click the item you wish to alias and hold down the mouse button. Contextual menus: Hold down the Ctrl key and click the item you wish to alias. Keystroke: Select the item you wish to alias, and press Command-l (the lowercase L).
How to Use Mac Aliases S hortcuts, in Windows, are icons that point to some other file, program, or disk drive. Macs have a similar feature called an alias. You can create an alias by clicking the name or icon of the file, program, or disk volume you want to alias and then choosing Make Alias from the Finder’s File menu.
The keyboard incantation for making aliases: Command+L. Just as in Windows, the alias icon appears with a little arrow at its lower left, and you can move the alias anywhere you want. You can even move it to the Trash if you no longer need it; the original file won’t go away. Mac OS X has one big improvement over this Windows feature, however.
![Mac Mac](http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/original-item-shown-via-alias-mac.jpg)
In Windows, if you move the original file to another folder or change its name, Windows gets unhappy and doesn’t know where to find the file anymore. OS X keeps track of where the file went and just does the right thing. Of course, if you delete the original file, there’s not much OS X can do. Watch out for aliases when you want to copy files to another medium, such as an external hard drive, CD-R, or flash drive. If you drag an alias, only the alias gets copied, not the file. To copy the file or folder the alias points to, click the alias and choose File→Show Original or just type Command+R.
![Alias files on a mac Alias files on a mac](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125489891/630385872.png)
I downloaded a repository from Bitbucket.org as a zip file and unzipped it using iZip to my Mac. Xcode found many compile errors because the zip or unzip did not preserve aliases properly. So I used hg to clone the repo, the aliases were preserved, and the Xcode compile was then clean. I would like to find all the aliases in my folder and replace them by their targets so future zips will work. I've done a lot of searching and can't find anything that says how find them either with the Mac Finder utility or the bash find command.
I've tried using Finder-All My Files with search-kind-other-alias and it finds about 100 aliases but not the ones in my local repo that I know are there. Do I need to rebuild/update the OSX 10.9.1 index list of all my files somehow? Does the find command have a flag for OSX alias file types? Can I navigate Finder to a folder and then search recursively for a file type (the search criteria option seems to disappear if All My Files is not selected).
Another alternative would be to print to file the contents of a full Finder list with the 'Kind' column showing and then sort by that. Mdfind 'kMDItemKind 'Alias' -onlyin /path/of/repo Seems like mdfind might work. But it only finds the same files that Finder-All My Files with search-kind-other-alias finds.
Those files and the ones in my repo are listed as Kind 'Alias' by Finder. I've read that there are 3 kinds of links: Alias, Symbolic Links, and Hard Links. The listing by the ls command for a file found by the mdfind command is: -rw-r-r-@ 1 kenm staff 45100 Dec 25 2012 GTLDrive.h The listing by the ls command for a file I would like to find is: lrwxr-xr-x 1 kenm staff 24 Jan 14 21:38 Headers -./Versions/A/Headers Finder calls them both 'Alias' but ls thinks they are different. Is there an mdfind command line that finds the second type of Alias?