mac osx ln命令：使用别名或符号链接链接目录mac osx？

Question

I have a tool (EVEHQ) on my bootcamp windows xp installed. I'm running parallels to use the application. works great. Problem is the application has a hardwired (binary) directory path it uses to store some data. I need the data on the mac side. I can simply copy the files by hand or automator to sync the files. But my idea was to create a link on the bootcamp filesystem so the application thinks it is storing it on the orginal location but in fact the files are stored where I use them.

where I use the files (XML files):

/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/fred/Library/Application Support/EVE Online/p_drive/My Documents/EVE/fittings

where EVEHQ the windows app stores them on the bootcamp partition:

/Volumes/c/Documents and Settings/fred/My Documents/Eve/fittings

so I used:

iMac:Eve fred$ pwd
/Volumes/c/Documents and Settings/fred/My Documents/Eve
iMac:Eve fred$ sudo ln -s "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/fred/Library/Application Support/EVE Online/p_drive/My Documents/EVE/fittings" fittings
Password:
ln: fittings: Function not implemented

What went wrong there? google tells me it is possible to create symbolic link to a directory. Is it because its cross partition? I thought on a unix filesystem there are no physical partitions just directory mountpoints. I'm not very experienced with unix.

Thanks for your feedback. kind regards Fred

Answer 1

It is because you want to make a link from a Windows partition, which doesn't support symbolic link. However, you can do the opposite: a link from the Mac partition to the Windows one, so that EvE stores your fitting on the Windows partition.

Answer 2

The immediate problem is that the file system driver doesn't support creation of symbolic links on that volume.

But, anyway, your plan wouldn't work. First, Windows wouldn't understand and respect the symbolic link. So, file access wouldn't get redirected. Second, even if it did recognize the symbolic link, it wouldn't understand the path it pointed to. The path string "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/fred/Library/Application Support/EVE Online/p_drive/My Documents/EVE/fittings" isn't meaningful to Windows. (Symbolic links are processed basically as strings.)