Almost every time you save a web page from a web browser to your local computer a PAGENAME.html (or .htm) file is created and a folder named 'PAGENAME_files' that contains resources specific to that page.
If you copy/move/delete either the folder or the .html file Windows automatically does the same operation the other file as well.
This behaviour also happens if you create a file named 1.html and a folder called 1_files.
How does this link happen? And why does it work only with web files?
This is a shell feature, not a file system feature. The shell copy engine just looks for a folder with the same name (plus a localized suffix) when copying/moving .htm[l] files.
This feature is called Connected Files and is documented here.
It's a built-in linkage in Windows.
Open up Explorer (not IE, Windows), Tools, Options, View, then in Advanced Settings there'll be a "Managing pairs of Web pages and folders" section.
If people are stuck and ended up here to find how to unlink, here's an easy trick : on Windows 10, I couldn't find how to unlink a .html file from its associated media folder, so I deleted both of them, and in the bin I restored only the .html file and it was then restored and unlinked from its folder.
It is a good question.
Under Windows 7 I managed to solve forced links by simply renaming the file.
I think it is the easiest way.
Related
I'd like to have an html file that organizes certain files scattered throughout my hard drive. For example, I have two files that I would link to:
C:\Programs\sort.mw
C:\Videos\lecture.mp4
The problem is that I'd like the links to function as a shortcut to the file. I've tried the following:
Link 1
Link 2
... but the first link does nothing and the second link opens the file in Chrome, not VLC.
My questions are:
Is there a way to adjust my HTML to treat the links as shortcuts to the files?
If there isn't a way to adjust the HTML, are there any other ways to neatly link to files scattered throughout the hard drive?
My computer runs Windows 7 and my web browser is Chrome.
You need to use the file:/// protocol (yes, that's three slashes) if you want to link to local files.
Link 1
Link 2
These will never open the file in your local applications automatically. That's for security reasons which I'll cover in the last section. If it opens, it will only ever open in the browser. If your browser can display the file, it will, otherwise it will probably ask you if you want to download the file.
You cannot cross from http(s) to the file protocol
Modern versions of many browsers (e.g. Firefox and Chrome) will refuse to cross from the http(s) protocol to the file protocol to prevent malicious behaviour.
This means a webpage hosted on a website somewhere will never be able to link to files on your hard drive. You'll need to open your webpage locally using the file protocol if you want to do this stuff at all.
Why does it get stuck without file:///?
The first part of a URL is the protocol. A protocol is a few letters, then a colon and two slashes. HTTP:// and FTP:// are valid protocols; C:/ isn't and I'm pretty sure it doesn't even properly resemble one.
C:/ also isn't a valid web address. The browser could assume it's meant to be http://c/ with a blank port specified, but that's going to fail.
Your browser may not assume it's referring to a local file. It has little reason to make that assumption because webpages generally don't try to link to peoples' local files.
So if you want to access local files: tell it to use the file protocol.
Why three slashes?
Because it's part of the File URI scheme. You have the option of specifying a host after the first two slashes. If you skip specifying a host it will just assume you're referring to a file on your own PC. This means file:///C:/etc is a shortcut for file://localhost/C:/etc.
These files will still open in your browser and that is good
Your browser will respond to these files the same way they'd respond to the same file anywhere on the internet. These files will not open in your default file handler (e.g. MS Word or VLC Media Player), and you will not be able to do anything like ask File Explorer to open the file's location.
This is an extremely good thing for your security.
Sites in your browser cannot interact with your operating system very well. If a good site could tell your machine to open lecture.mp4 in VLC.exe, a malicious site could tell it to open virus.bat in CMD.exe. Or it could just tell your machine to run a few Uninstall.exe files or open File Explorer a million times.
This may not be convenient for you, but HTML and browser security weren't really designed for what you're doing. If you want to be able to open lecture.mp4 in VLC.exe consider writing a desktop application instead.
If you are running IIS on your PC you can add the directory that you are trying to reach as a Virtual Directory.
To do this you right-click on your Site in ISS and press "Add Virtual Directory".
Name the virtual folder. Point the virtual folder to your folder location on your local PC.
You also have to supply credentials that has privileges to access the specific folder eg. HOSTNAME\username and password.
After that you can access the file in the virtual folder as any other file on your site.
http://sitename.com/virtual_folder_name/filename.fileextension
By the way, this also works with Chrome that otherwise does not accept the file-protocol file://
Hope this helps someone :)
Janky at best
right click </td>
and then right click, select "copy location" option, and then paste into url.
back to 2017:
use URL.createObjectURL( file ) to create local link to file system that user select;
don't forgot to free memory by using URL.revokeObjectURL()
I've a way and work like this:
<'a href="FOLDER_PATH" target="_explorer.exe">Link Text<'/a>
Dear Haskell community I have written my first gui application and decided to use
threepenny-gui to do so.
The task is the following search the files in a given folder for matches and provide links to open those files. In addition I made nice parse and render function as the files (mostly) have a special formatting.
But now I have stumbled upon a problem - most browsers prohibit links to local files by href="file://localhost/home/user/folder/file.pdf" being opened, for security reasons, which I do understand and find completely sensible.
I tried to use href="./file.pdf" when the program and the file are in the same folder, which also doesn't seem to work.
The code of the whole application is available at github/epsilonhalbe, I run it in a folder and access it via a browser at localhost:100000
The HTTP server provided by threepenny-gui will serve up static content from the directory you specify in tpStatic. Put your files in that directory, and make your links' paths be relative to it, and you'll be good to go!
As of threepenny-gui-0.4.*, there are also two functions loadFile and loadDirectory that can be used to serve a local file or directory at an automatically generated URL. This can be useful if the tpStatic field is not enough.
I am developing a web application in which I implemented the help.chm file.
My question is:
How to open the chm help file by using a hyperlink in my web application without a download dialog box?
You can't and you shouldn't. A chm is a file archive that requires a separate viewer, it isn't rendered directly inside the browser.
There are also security considerations with these files, so with certain versions of Windows you cannot open them from a remote (including network) location - they must be opened from the local machine (IIRC this is on WinXP SP2+, Vista and Win 7).
Do you know what is, in fact, a CHM file ? It's a set of html files compiled in a big archive. So, the simplest solution to open those files without showing the "download dialog", is to not package your html files as chm, but to left them on your web site, and make classical static links to them.
When you save an html file "completely"(as opposite to "just html"), the html file and an associated resource folder will be saved. The interesting thing is that when you delete the html file, the folder will be deleted automatically.
The folder must not be some ordinary folder. What is it called and is it possible to do this programmatically?
I googled a bit but cannot find the answer because I don't even know what keywords should I type as I haev no idea what this is called.
I believe that the Microsoft term for this special folder is a 'Connected File', and I think it was introduced in Windows 2000 — in other words, it's a Windows/Explorer feature rather than an Internet Explorer feature. I haven't seen much about it, but this MSDN document could be a good starting point:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb776887(VS.85).aspx#connected
Are you deleting this from Windows Explorer? I think it is a feature of that program, and not operating system. Try to delete it with any other file manager: FAR, Total Commander, etc
I'm not sure in which languages those extensions are, I think the are written in Html, Javascript or JSON. As far as I know they are "compressed" in a .CRX file.
It is possible to directly modify the html, js, json of a Chrome Extension (or whatever language they use)?
Installed Chrome extension directories are listed below:
Copy the folder of the extension you wish to modify. ( Named according to the extension ID, to find the ID of the extension, go to chrome://extensions/). Once copied, you have to remove the _metadata folder.
From chrome://extensions in Developer mode select Load unpacked extension... and select your copied extension folder, if it contains a subfolder this is named by the version, select this version folder where there is a manifest file, this file is necessary for Chrome.
Make your changes, then select reload and refresh the page for your extension to see your changes.
Chrome extension directories
Mac:
/Users/username/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Extensions
Windows 7:
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Extensions
Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default
Ubuntu 14.04:
~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Extensions/
I searched it in Google and I found this:
The Google Chrome Extension file type is CRX. It is essentially a compression format. So if you want to see what is behind an extension, the scripts and the code, just change the file-type from “CRX” to “ZIP” .
Unzip the file and you will get all the info you need. This way you can see the guts, learn how to write an extension yourself, or modify it for your own needs.
Then you can pack it back up with Chrome’s internal tools which automatically create the file back into CRX. Installing it just requires a click.
A signed CRX file has a header that will cause most/all unzippers to barf. This is not the easiest way to go about it, but here's how to do it from a bash command line.
The basic idea is to find where the original unsigned zipfile begins, then copy the CRX file to a zip file but exclude the CRX header.
hexdump -C the_extension.crx | more
Look in the output for the start of the zip file, which are the ASCII bytes "PK". In the sample I tried, the PK was at offset 0x132. (From reading the CRX spec, I think this number will vary from file to file because of different signature lengths.) That number is what we'll use in the next step.
dd if=the_extension.crx of=the_extension.zip bs=1 skip=0x132 (For the skip parameter, substitute the offset you found in the previous step.)
Now unzip the .zip that you just created.
Fiddle with the files in the unzipped directory, then either install the unsigned/unpacked extension into your Chrome installation, or else repackage it just as you would any other Chrome extension.
I'm sure that there is a more concise way to do this. Bash experts, please improve on my answer.
Note that some zip programs have trouble unzipping a CRX like sathish described - if this is the case, try using 7-Zip - http://www.7-zip.org/
I have read the other answers and found it important to note a few other things:
1.) For Mac users: When you click "Load unpacked extension...", the Library folder is by default hidden and (even if the Show Hidden files option is toggled on your Mac) it might not show up in Chrome's finder window.
2.) The sub folder containing the extension is a random alpha-numeric string named after the extension's ID, which can be found on Chrome's extension page if Developer flag is set to true. (Upper right hand checkbox on the extensions page)
(Already said) I found this out while making some Chrome themes (which are long gone now... :-P)
Chrome themes, extensions, etc. are just compressed files. Get 7-zip or WinRar to unzip it. Each extension/theme has a manifest.json file. Open the manifest.json file in notepad. Then, if you know the coding, modify the code. There will be some other files. If you look in the manifest file you might be able to figure out what the are for. Then, you can change everything...
.CRX files are like .ZIP files, just change the extension and right click > Extract Files and you are done.
Once you have extracted files --> modify them and add to zip and change extension back to .crx.
Other way around --> Open Chrome --> Settings --> Extensions --> Enable Developer Options --> Load unpacked Extension (modified extracted files folder) and then click pack extension.
Source
Now Chrome is multi-user so Extensions should be nested under the OS user profile then the Chrome user profile, My first Chrome user was called Profile 1, my Extensions path was C:\Users\ username \AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\ Profile 1 \Extensions\.
To find yours Navigate to chrome://version/ (I use about: out of laziness).
Notice the Profile Path and just append \Extensions\ and you have yours.
Hope this brings this info on this question up to date more.
It's possible to modify the code of .CRX extension, because it's a simple .zip archive. You can download extension, extract it's source code, modify it (test and debug it as it's on your side), and package back into .CRX file.
I googled out this tool to simply download .CRX extension and extract the source code and it worked for me: http://crxextractor.com
Everything it does is parses .CRX file format and extracts actual .zip containing the source code.
If you have installed the Portable version of Chrome, or have it installed in a custom directory - the extensions won't be available in directory referenced in above answers.
Try right-clicking on Chrome's shortcut & Check the "Target" directory. From there, navigate to one directory above and you should be able to see the User Data folder and then can use the answers mentioned above