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Using symlinks to sync with Dropbox on a Mac (ikarandeep.tumblr.com)
1 point by ikarandeep on May 4, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



Sooner or later this will break. I used this method for years. However, the latest versions of Dropbox (around 2.6.7) screwed the whole thing up: since Dropbox doesn't support symlinks, it frequently “thinks” that the permissions of the symlinks is the permissions that the linked-to files should have. And since symlinks often look like “lrwxrwxrwx” it will chmod the original files 0777, i.e. user, group AND world writable, which is probably not what you want.

E.g., I had symlinked my webserver's directories into Dropbox, only to find out that all the files had their permissions changed to “-rwxrwxrwx”.

Your mileage may vary, but be sure you know what you're doing. Dropbox is unreliable with symlinks.


Thanks for the info. I just checked and I'm using 2.6.31 which seems to be the latest version: https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes

Also just checked permissions on files and they seem to be correct.

I'm running OS X 10.9.2




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