A code commit that I spotted today on the Chromium repository suggests that the team is working on symlinks support for Files, the built-in file manager app for Chrome OS.

What is Symlinks

I had to do a bit of Googling and Wikiying to learn the basics. Here is the gist of it.

Symlink is the short name for Symbolic Links. According to Wikipedia, it is a term for any file that contains a reference to another file or directory in the form of an absolute or relative path and that affects pathname resolution.

Here is what I found on another discussion thread:

Soft Links (symbolic links) – You can make links to files and directories, and you can create links (shortcuts) on a different partition and with a different inode number from the original.

The Code

The code commit that I spotted today talks about adding “support for showing symlinks in drive.”

From what I gather from online discussions like Reddit thread, at present the only way for anyone who wants to use Symlinks on Chromebook is through the Shell terminal. This change however, puts Symlinks into the GUI or user interface.

If you are a developer who works with Symlinks, feel free to drop in a comment with any additional information that you might be able to add. I’ll be really interested to find out how useful this is going to be!

Thoughts? Comments?