Which type of link is best for any given situation is controversial, to say the least. But if you don’t use Terminal and want to create links in the Finder, you’ll be using Finder Aliases. Towards the end of the El Capitan cycle, aliases had got quite wobbly, but early in Sierra, Apple revamped them and increased their reliability and usefulness. But no matter how conscientious you are, aliases have a habit of breaking over time.

When you’ve migrated folders from a series of old Macs, through a succession of versions of macOS, you may well end up with dozens which are either in danger of breaking, or already out of touch with whatever they pointed to. Unless you fancy spending long hours trawling through each folder, there doesn’t seem any practical way to check folders for stale or broken Finder Aliases – unless you fancy using my free utility Alifix.

Alifix version 1.0 is now available to scan through any selected folder, identify those aliases which are now broken, refresh those which are in danger of breaking, and tell you what your broken aliases used to point at, so you can trash or replace them.

This is ideal preparation for migrating to a new Mac, copying or cloning an existing disk, upgrading macOS, or as part of your periodic housekeeping routines.

This first release follows a very long beta phase, and now incorporates the following improvements:

• it has a detailed Help book which also explains how it works in code,
• it checks its code integrity each time you open the app,
• it saves its window sizes and positions, and option settings,
• it has a link to its product page on this blog,
• it lets you change text size,
• it has been ported to Swift 5 and Xcode 10.3,
• it’s now fully compatible with all versions of macOS from Sierra (10.12.3) to Catalina (beta).

Alifix version 1.1 is (at last) available from here: alifix11
from Downloads above, and from its Product Page.

Update: Version 1.1 substituted as it contains a valuable fix for handling older aliases.