What are those .alias files?

The project files (.lvproj) in LabVIEW 8.0 are great. It is a great way to organize everything having to do with your "project." You can keep text files, Word doc files, PDF files, html files and all sorts of other stuff. Plus if you have LabVIEW Pro and you are building an application for framework, you have to use a project.

So after a project is created, a .alias file shows up. What is this file? If you open the file in TextWrangler (or whatever your favorite text editor is), you will see that it contains text like:

[My Computer]
My Computer = "10.0.39.175"

Ok, it has my IP address. What good is it. Well, on the Mac it isn't much good. You can pretty much delete them. You don't need to add them to source code control. On Windows, it keeps track of mappings between embedded targets and their IP addresses. Its kind of a DNS system of sorts.

But for us Mac users, they are files to put up with. You can create a Folder Action to automatically delete .alias files in the folders of your interest. Since my AppleScript is a bit weak, I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.