MacOS has had a concept of Aliases since System 7. These work a little like symbolic links, a little like hard links, but basically appear to be empty files to command-line applications.

Since I need to figure out where these links point to, I created this node module. For obvious reasons, it will only work on macOS.

This module now also allows the creation of alias files, and includes two bin/ utilities.

Given a file at /Users/foo/file that has an alias /Users/foo/Documents/doc:

const aliasResolver = require('alias-resolver').default;
const resolvedFile = aliasResolver('/Users/foo/file'); 
//resolvedFile is /Users/foo/Documents/doc

const anotherResolvedFile = aliasResolver('/Users/foo/notAnAlias');
//anotherResolvedFile is null

const createAlias = require('alias-resolver').createAlias;
createAlias('/usr/bin/ls', './ls-alias');

Alias files are tricky to deal with on the command-line. This module now includes two helpers to make things easier.

  > npm -g install alias-resolver
  > create-alias /usr/bin/ls ./ls-alias
  > resolve-alias ls-alias
  /usr/bin/ls