OS X alias folders being treated as files, not folders

[eronlloyd]

The Jupyter directory listing (starting at /tree) in OS X appears not to know how to treat folders created via the Alias command in Finder. Instead of redirecting to the proper folder, it displays the following error:

Error! /Users/eronlloyd/Projects/<project> is not UTF-8 encoded  
Saving disabled.  
See Console for more details.

However, when instead mapping to another folder outside of the Jupyter directory with

ln -s /Path/To/Project Project

it seems to work correctly. From my quick look around, this seems to be challenge to do with Python, so standard path checks (including the new pathlib) fail to test for this.

Fortunately this is a rare circumstance, and creating traditional symlinks is a satisfactory workaround, but I thought it might be something to make note of here.

[minrk]

Thanks for the note! I'm not sure what the best Python way to handle OS X Aliases would be.

[Carreau]

http://mac-alias.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ might be of help, but unfortunately it seemlike Aliases are 1) a Private API of Apple. 2) deprecated.