Sequoia: Alias not revealing contents in List View

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Limnos Author

Level 10

427,103 points

Sequoia: Alias not revealing contents in List View

Original TItle: List view disclosure triangle not revealing contents of folder in internal drive.

M4mini with latest Sequoia.

In a folder (B) on an external drive I have an alias to a folder (A) which is on the desktop of the internal drive.

Boot Drive > folder A

External Drive > folder B > alias to A

I have other regular folders in that B folder. I view the B folder in List View. I see disclosure triangles for all the regular folders inside of B, but there is no disclosure triangle to reveal the contents of A. If I view the folder as columns and click on the alias to A it does show the contents of A, but I prefer to use List View.

Is there a way to get the alias to show the contents of the A folder in List View?

Mac mini (M4, 2024)

Posted on Dec 14, 2025 3:54 PM

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Answer 1

etresoft

Level 9

56,320 points

Dec 15, 2025 6:16 PM in response to Limnos

An "alias" in this sense is little more than an AppleScript to opens another folder when you double-click on it.

You can replace the alias with a symbolic link and that should fix it.

Note that it's easy to create a symbolic link from an external into the boot drive because the boot drive is always on /. Trying to go the other way is not reliable as external volumes can get assigned different names on mount, which would break any symbolic links that point into it.

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Answer 2

a brody

Level 10

85,302 points

Dec 15, 2025 6:01 PM in response to Limnos

Yes, the difference is some aliases are known as hard links versus symbolic links.

Create Symbolic Link - Apple Community

discusses this issue at length.

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Answer 3

Limnos Author

Level 10

427,103 points

Dec 15, 2025 7:33 PM in response to etresoft

Hmmm, tried using ln -s source target and it created the correct folder on the external drive, but it doesn't have a disclosure arrow. When I get info on it, it just says it is an alias. Not so worried about that since a symbolic link is kind of a glorified alias, but I was hoping it would present as a folder.

I am trying to do this to reduce steps where I found that setting my screenshots to go to a folder on my external drive was resulting in a cannot save to destination drive error. I was hoping that I could do at least some partial shortcuts to having to open up the internal Screenshots source and external target folders, copying the files, then delete the files from the source folder.

There's nothing special about the external drive. It's a HDD formatted HFS+ I have it permanently attached to my computer since that's where all my data are stored.

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