Anders Johansson wrote:
On Tuesday 26 April 2005 21:37, L. Mark Stone wrote:
The best part of the WorkPlaceShell desktop that I have yet to see anywhere else. Kind of like "live" symlinks or Windows shortcuts. Make a shadow of an object (like a file). Now change the name of the file, or move the file to another directory. The shadow still works.
What's the difference between that and a hard link? Did shadows work across two different filesystems?
Yes. They can best be described as another instance of the original object, sort of like a hard link, but much more flexible. It is, in fact, part of the original object, in that it's stored in the extended attributes for that object. I've mentioned extended attributes a couple of times. With those, you could store up to 64 KB of metadata, about an object. For example, you could store tokenized REXX code, in the EA of the cmd file. In a program I used to use for Compuserve, whenever I downloaded a ZIP file, the program would extract the file.idz (or whatever it was called), which described the ZIP file contents and place it in the description box of the objects properties etc. Almost any of those properties could be used for searching. And there's much more than I can tell you about here.