certainlyakey
6/23/2014 - 12:05 PM

OS X sandboxed apps and symlinks problem - solution

OS X sandboxed apps and symlinks problem - solution

On OS X versions that support sandboxed apps (beginning from Lion), it's sometimes impossible to symlink a sandboxed app application support files to other partition, at least, an inner portion of the folder structure.

For example, Airmail is a sandboxed email client. I'd like to move its settings and email db to another partition by symlinking it, but it doesn't work with the app if I symlink an inner folder of its library container:

cd ~/Library/Containers/it.bloop.airmail.beta7/Data/Library/Application\ Support/
ln -s /Volumes/doxx/sys/Airmail Airmail

The solution is to symlink the whole container:

cd ~/Library/Containers/
ln -s /Volumes/doxx/sys/Airmail/it.bloop.airmail it.bloop.airmail