I thought I’ll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!

I’ll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!

  • CyclohexaneOPM
    16•3 months ago

    A symlink works more closely to the first way you described it. The software opening a symlink has to actually follow it. It’s possible for a software to not follow the symlink (either intentionally or not).

    So your sync software has to actually be able to follow symlinks. I’m not familiar with how gdrive and similar solutions work, but I know this is possible with something like rsync

    • @[email protected]
      11•3 months ago

      An application can know that a file represents a soft link, but they don’t need to do anything differently to follow it. If the program just opens it, reads it, writes to it, etc, as though it were the original file, it will just worktm without them needing to do anything differently.

      It is possible for the software to not follow a soft symlink intentionally, yes (if they don’t follow it unintentionally, that might be a bug).

      As for hard links, I’m not as certain, but I think these need to be supported at the filesystem level (which is why they often have specific restrictions), and the application can’t tell the difference.

    • @[email protected]
      4•3 months ago

      So I guess it’s something like pressing ctrl+c: most software doesn’t specifically handle this hotkey so in general it will interrupt a running process, but software can choose to handle it differently (like in vim ctrl+C does not interrupt it).

      Thanks.

      Fun fact: pressing X (close button) on a window does not make it that your app is closed, it just sends a signal that you wish to close it, your app can choose what to do with this signal.