Function
An alias acts as a stand-in for any object in the file system, such as a document, an application, a folder, a hard disk, a network share or removable medium or a printer. When double-clicked, the computer will act the same way as if the original file had been double-clicked. Likewise, choosing an alias file from within a 'File Open' dialog box would open the original file. The purpose of an alias is to assist the user in managing large numbers of files by providing alternative ways to access them without having to copy the files themselves. While a typical alias under the classic Mac OS was small, between 1 and 5 KB, under OS X it can be fairly large, more than 5000 KB for the alias to a folder.
Read more about this topic: Alias (Mac OS)
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“For me being a poet is a job rather than an activity. I feel I have a function in society, neither more nor less meaningful than any other simple job. I feel it is part of my work to make poetry more accessible to people who have had their rights withdrawn from them.”
—Jeni Couzyn (b. 1942)
“Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information—hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)