Welcome to the revived Apple II Archive at apple2.caltech.edu!

When this server was running on a UNIX system, symbolic links were used
as a means of placing files under more than one subdirectory - for instance,
the NEW.FILES directory contained only symbolic links, while the original 
files were located in directories according to their category. This was
completely transparent to the user, because under UNIX, a symbolic link is 
treated just like the original file - it has the same size, modification date,
and other attributes. 

On the current server (a Macintosh), there are no symbolic links. Instead,
Macintosh aliases are used to fulfill the same purpose. These are also 
transparent to the user in terms of downloading (except in Gopher transfers),
since the ftp server will automatically resolve an alias and send the original
file - however, aliases have very small file lengths (on the order of 800 bytes)
in directory listings, and can have different modification dates than the 
original files. 

Because of this, there may be some confusion as to file sizes and such. Under
Gopher, aliases are not currently resolved, and you will get an 800 byte alias
file if you download an alias. If you find this happening, just look in the
FILELIST.<DATE> file and search for the file of the same name which does _not_
have an approximately 800 byte file size (or, use an ftp client to grab the
file instead of a gopher client).

Also, note that when using the search capability of our Web interface, you
may get multiple occurences of the same file, since NetFinder handles aliases
transparently and treats them all as if they were the file being aliased - if
you find listings for more than one file with exactly the same name and
exactly the same size, even if they have different modification dates, they're
almost certainly the same file.

If you have any comments or questions, please send me e-mail.

Daniel Zimmerman
dmz@cco.caltech.edu
6 August 1996