[OS X TeX] Mac Pointers and Images

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 10.09.2009 um 06:05 schrieb Christopher Allen:

> (Am I incorrect that "alias" is Apple's term for a pointer?)


Yes and no. An alias is also the name of a self-made command in a  
shell environment.


Apple's HFS and HFS+ file systems (and their variants) provide file  
aliases (⌘L, meaning link). They don't work with command line  
utilities and TeX in particular. You need to use the ln command. It  
can create, when source and target of the link are on the same  
volume, so-called hard links. These means that the contents of the  
file is allocated only once in the file system as blocks on the disk  
and more than one folder references these blocks, which is also shown  
in the so-called "link count" in ls' output:

37439879 -rwxr-xr-x   3 pete  admin  10111160  9 Sep 00:23 emacs
37439879 -rwxr-xr-x   3 pete  admin  10111160  9 Sep 00:23  
emacs-23.1.50.1
36914610 -rw-r--r--   1 pete  admin     78972 29 Aug 18:17 emacs.c
37439470 -rw-r--r--   1 pete  admin    251876  9 Sep 00:07 emacs.o

The first number, the so-called inode, references the file in the  
file system and the next number (3 or 1) is the link count (the third  
number is the file's size in bytes). This increased link count also  
makes it hard to delete that file: one rm command is not sufficient,  
it will just decrement the link count by one and as long as it is  
greater than zero the file continues to exist, somewhere.

Using ln as 'ln -s' you can create symbolic links or sym-links. Their  
targets can point to sources somewhere, on a different volume, on  
another disk, from some server. The target of a sym-link is a special  
file itself:

28654890 lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel        43 15 Jan  2009 pdfcrop - 
 > ../../texmf-dist/scripts/pdfcrop/pdfcrop.pl
28655053 lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel         6 15 Jan  2009 pdfetex ->  
pdftex
28827172 lrwxrwxrwx   1 root  wheel         6 21 Jan  2009 pdflatex - 
 > pdftex
32251369 -rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   2814124 31 Mär 23:31 pdftex

The 'l' which starts the second column expresses that this directory  
entry is a sym-link, the names at the end contain the '->' pointer  
symbol pointing to the source of the sym-link, in the above example  
either the file pdftex in the same directory or the file pdfcrop.pl  
in another directory.


For your purposes you can use the command line to change (working)  
directory (via the command cd) to that with the EPS files and then  
create hard links in the other directories which will need the files:

	apply 'ln %1 <target directory>' *.eps

Repeat as often as you have target directories.


And consider to convert the EPS files to PDF and use pdftex directly!  
Now, with this change and re-organisation, you can change more.

--
Greetings

   Pete

Let's face it; we don't want a free market economy either.
		– James Farley, president, Coca-Cola Export Corp., 1959