"Finder aliases have never been fully documented by Apple, but have been found to contain within their opaque data structures inode numbers." I was holding out

"Finder aliases have never been fully documented by Apple, but have been found to contain within their opaque data structures inode numbers." I was holding out hope that Apple would publish a tool for working with aliases, or at least a specification of aliases so a 3rd party could design a tool. I have a volume with hundreds of aliases that don't work anymore, because the files they pointed to have moved to a new volume. I wish I could batch edit their paths, using find and replace. Many Apple users have asked for an alias editing tool, as I found when I went searching for one, to no avail - not even a kludgy hack exists. I wonder what risk such a tool would pose. Why doesn't Apple document the structure of aliases? Is it just because they're messy, like photoshop psds, and they don't want anyone to see their inelegance? Or is it because it would open Macs to new kinds of mischief? Aliases are fantastically useful, until they break.