8 ms·

Unfortunately the terrible file management seems to be spreading to MacOS, rather than vice versa. Now if you have iCloud Drive turned on and navigate to ~/Docu

Unfortunately the terrible file management seems to be spreading to MacOS, rather than vice versa. Now if you have iCloud Drive turned on and navigate to ~/Documents in Finder, if you go up one level you'll find yourself in some kind of virtual folder called iCloud Drive, rather than your home directory. This is exactly the sort of weird filesystem-tree-concept-breaking thing that made Windows Explorer so annoying to use for me.

saagarjha 5y ago
You mean "if you have your Desktop and Documents folder synced to iCloud".
derefr 5y ago
iCloud Drive is not a "virtual folder" (I think you mean "shell folder"? Like the one that you see when you navigate up from / in the Finder?) iCloud Drive is a real place in your home directory (it is located at ~/Library/Mobile Documents/). It's equivalent to the root of any other synced-directory service — Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Your Documents and Desktop folders — when iCloud Drive sync for them is enabled — are just regular folders inside that synced folder. The hacky part is the fact that, while the Documents and Desktop folders are canonically nested inside the Mobile Documents folder, they're also linked from outside of it with weird pseudo-symlinks. Those pseudo-symlinks are more than just symlinks — they appear as real directories (like Linux bind-mounts), which is helpful to avoid breaking legacy apps that expect to be able to find real directories at ~/Desktop and ~/Documents. But, like a symlink, the "real" directory these pseudo-symlinks point to only exists in one place, and that place is ~/Library/Mobile Documents/. Presuming `readlink(2)` was called to resolve the file at any point, you can't navigate back "up" from the resulting file, to find yourself back at the directory that contained the symlink. Once you resolve the link, the symlink isn't part of the resulting path any more.

saagarjha 5y ago

You mean "if you have your Desktop and Documents folder synced to iCloud".

derefr 5y ago

iCloud Drive is not a "virtual folder" (I think you mean "shell folder"? Like the one that you see when you navigate up from / in the Finder?) iCloud Drive is a real place in your home directory (it is located at ~/Library/Mobile Documents/). It's equivalent to the root of any other synced-directory service — Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Your Documents and Desktop folders — when iCloud Drive sync for them is enabled — are just regular folders inside that synced folder. The hacky part is the fact that, while the Documents and Desktop folders are canonically nested inside the Mobile Documents folder, they're also linked from outside of it with weird pseudo-symlinks. Those pseudo-symlinks are more than just symlinks — they appear as real directories (like Linux bind-mounts), which is helpful to avoid breaking legacy apps that expect to be able to find real directories at ~/Desktop and ~/Documents. But, like a symlink, the "real" directory these pseudo-symlinks point to only exists in one place, and that place is ~/Library/Mobile Documents/. Presuming `readlink(2)` was called to resolve the file at any point, you can't navigate back "up" from the resulting file, to find yourself back at the directory that contained the symlink. Once you resolve the link, the symlink isn't part of the resulting path any more.