Although we don't need it much but still if we want to know the original file, how would we do that?
How can we find the original file in case we create several hard links to a file?
I assume that you are talking about hard links in a POSIX file system.
You can't. As far as the file system is concerned, the hard links are indistinguishable.
OK. Maybe if you created the hard links via a shell, the commands might be in the shell history. Or the information might be in log files. Or possibly audit files ... if auditing is enabled. But not normally.
Related
This is likely not a simple topic - I have researched this to the best of my abilities and realize that it is not supported in any typical fashion.
My goal is to enable something similar to .app files from OSX, where the application, as well as its user data, can exist in the same file. I imagine it would require writing a tool to manage this behaviour, but this question is more about how to achieve this in the Windows OS. I am quite flexible regarding the implementation details, but the more straightforward the behaviour, the better (i.e. avoiding copying or compressing/decompressing entire directories/archives at runtime would be ideal).
Approaches I have considered:
Find a way to get explorer to treat a directory as a file, so that it can be associated. I have found a way to get explorer to treat a directory as a control panel item, I have thus far been unable to find a way to use this to associate a custom program. See the infamous "godmode hack" for Windows (name a directory something to the effect of "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}"). This one seems the most hopeful, but I'm at wits end trying to find information about creating a new association of this type.
Come up with some kind of archive format which can extract executable information to a temporary directory, launch this executable passing the archive as a commandline parameter. This seems like the ugliest solution, from a performance perspective. I would prefer a different solution if at all possible, one which doesn't involve making duplicates of the program or its data to run.
Find a way to associate a directory directly, though I have found no trace of this being supported in Windows, and I assume this is a dead-end.
Find a way to get an executable to include writeable embedded files. I have been unable to make any headway with this- I even tried a resource hacker approach, but obviously you cannot modify the assembly while its in use.
Tried to make a self-modifying JAR file with Java, but the route I took would add the JDK as a runtime requirement, which seems a bit overkill. Even then, it would be limited to Java, and I'm pretty sure it's not actually supposed to allow that in the first place.
Modify Windows Explorer. I shudder at the amount of work this would take, not to mention the at-best gray area it falls under legally. Perhaps there's a way to extend explorer to achieve this, I'm not sure.
A custom archive file. This seems like the most straightforward way to do it. But it would ideally need to be an archive format that has very little overhead for file I/O. Could even be some kind of virtual disk that gets mounted, but I am imagining that would be pretty heavy.
I would appreciate any insight that anyone has on this topic. I won't go into reasons as they are irrelevant to the question itself- I'm aware it is likely not the most practical solution to anything in particular. Consider it a novel pursuit.
It can be done by application virtualization,
Read this wikipedia page theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_application
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_virtualization
And two pages about software:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_ThinApp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_(software)
Windows 7 added the ability for a Desktop.ini file to add/change the folder verbs on a per-folder basis. Using that trick it is possible to create a "folders as applications" style setup.
So, there isn't anything big that I'm really going to use this for, but I've have made a little batch (.bat) program that I thought would be awesome if I had this feature in it.
I don't want anything that is going to mess up my LAN network, so try to make it as simple
as possible.
So my idea is that I want it so when the program starts it scans for an update (which will be found on Dropbox), then ask the user if they want to update, then it will install an update file and delete the old one. If anyone knows a way to do this safely, please tell me, thanks!
I have a tiny bit of an idea on how this is possible, but it is not very efficient. Thanks!
I assume you have a file on your computer and one on Dropbox and sometimes you want to edit it from another computer and then when you get back home and start up the program it will check whether the Dropbox file is more up to date than the one you have on your computer?
I think the easiest way would be to either use a special file name, like, myBatchFile_update.bat or something and then make your program check for that file in your Dropbox folder. If it's there, copy it and then rename it to myBatchFile.bat or something. Also rename update file. You may want to look up copy and xcopy and ren, first.
Another way would be to keep the "if updated" information inside of the file in a function (although it's hardly functions in batch). Or you could just keep another file called for example is_updated.bat where you keep information about whether it's updated or not. You echo something like set update=true (if it's updated) to the update file when it has updated and when you have edited the program you also edit the update file so that it says false. Then, when you need the information, you just call the update file.
I would like to generate some temporary files in the course of my application. Specifically, I'm using AVAudioRecorder to record a file that I, upon stopping the recording, would like to load and edit/process. My question is:
What is the appropriate standard place to create temporary files. Is there some generally accepted approach to this for Mac or for iPad programming in general? I don't want to simply create a directory and write files into it if there is a proper protocol to this.
The answer to this question is actually a lot more complicated then one might assume. One cannot necessarily just use NSTemporaryDirectory and be done. I cocoadev.com has some good pages on this topic and I would suggest that you study them yourself and determine what will work best for your circumstance.
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?NSTemporaryDirectory
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?GettingTemporaryFolderOnSpecificVolume
The usual place for applications to store temporary data is /var/tmp. You could also use /tmp but this directory is for system-generated temporary files and anything in /tmp is deleted when the machine reboots.
What I found was that according to the iOS Application Programming Guide, I am supposed to query for the appropriate temporary folder for my application via NSTemporaryDirectory(). I tried this and it returned a folder within the /var directory, in my case '/var/folders/pQ/pQ+ZqZCSHWSIHftcbIo57U+++TI/-Tmp-/'.
/tmp or /usr/tmp are the usual places to store temporary files in Unix (which Mac OS X and iOS are).
I'm going through a lot of computers and a lot of data here and there.
I'm moving it all to a server so everybody has access to it.
There i have a folder for each computer. But a lot of the data is the same.
Is there any program to help me combine the data that is the same ?
It hell trying to do this manually.
Basically i want to tell this program, hey check this folder here C:/test and if there are any files that are duplicated, delete one of them.
If you need a tool for manual comparison of large directory structures, try Beyond Compare.
If you want automatic comparison scripts, Cygwin diff is good, possibly embedded in a shell script.
I'm trying to reverse-engineer a program that does some basic parsing: text in, text out. I've got an executable "reference implementation" and the source code to what must be a different version, since the compiled source output != executable output.
The process creates and deletes temporary files very quickly in a multi-step parsing process. If I could take a look at the individual temporary files, I could get some great diagnostic data to narrow down where my source differs from the binary.
Is there any way to do any of the following?
Freeze a directory so that file creation will work but file deletion will fail silently?
Run a program in "slow motion" so that I can look at the files that it creates?
Log everything that a program does, including any data written out to files?
Running a tool like NTFS Undelete should give you the chance to recover the temporary files it's creating then deleting. Combine this with ProcMon from Sysinternals to get the right filenames.
You didn't mention what OS you're doing this on, but assuming you're using Windows...
You might be able to make use of SysInternals tools like Process Explorer and Process Monitor to get a better idea of the files being accessed. As far as I know, there's no "write-only" option on folders. For "slowing down" the files, you'd just need to use a slower computer. For logging, the SysInternals tools will help out quite a bit. Once you have a file name(s) that are being created, you could try preventing their deletion by opening the files in a stream from another process. That would prevent the system from being able to delete them.
There are two ways to attack this:
Run various small test cases through both systems and notice the differences. Since the test cases are small, you should be able to figure out why your code works differently than the executable.
Disassemble the executable and remove all the "delete temp file" instructions. Depending on how this works, this could be a very complex task (say when there is no central place where it happens).