Alifix is a free Mac utility from The Eclectic Light Company that repairs and audits macOS aliases, rescuing broken links and refreshing stale ones across your file system.
What is Alifix?
Alifix is a focused, single-purpose tool that inspects macOS aliases — those lightweight pointer files the Finder creates to stand in for originals — and either fixes the ones that have lost their way or flags the ones that are beyond saving. If you have ever double-clicked an alias only to be greeted by the Finder's apologetic "the original item cannot be found" dialog, Alifix is the utility you have been missing.
It comes from Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company, the same prolific developer behind Taccy, Signet, Precize, and a string of other small, well-crafted Mac tools. Alifix fits right into that lineup: no subscription, no bloat, no learning curve.
What does Alifix do best?
Alifix excels at batch-scanning a folder hierarchy and surfacing every broken alias in one tidy list, giving you a clear picture of the damage before you commit to any repairs.
macOS aliases survive file moves and renames far better than Unix symlinks do — the filesystem stores a persistent reference alongside the path — but they are not indestructible. Copy a project to a new drive, restore from Time Machine to a different volume, or restructure a deep folder tree, and you will almost certainly end up with aliases pointing at nothing. Alifix handles exactly this scenario: drop a folder onto the window, let it scan, and within seconds you see which aliases resolved cleanly, which need a refresh, and which are simply gone.
The repair step is equally direct. Where the original file still exists but the stored path has drifted, Alifix updates the alias record rather than forcing you to delete and recreate. That distinction matters when the alias lives inside an app's support files or a project template you have been accumulating for years.
Is Alifix free?
Yes — Alifix is free to download from The Eclectic Light Company's website with no nag screens, trial limits, or in-app purchases.
Howard Oakley's tools are funded by reader support on his blog and occasional donations; none of the Eclectic Light utilities require payment to use fully. That is a rare thing in the Mac utility space, and it makes Alifix easy to recommend without hesitation.
Who should use Alifix?
Alifix is most useful for developers, power users, and sysadmins who manage complex folder structures, project templates, or large media libraries where macOS aliases do real organizational work.
If your workflow is entirely Spotlight and iCloud with no deliberate use of aliases, you may never need it. But if you maintain a studio of Logic Pro template projects, a library of Xcode target folders, or even a heavily aliased photo archive — and you have migrated that library across drives even once — there is a good chance you have silent broken aliases you have not noticed yet. Alifix makes that invisible debt visible.
It is also a sensible tool to run after major file-system events: migrating to a new Mac with Migration Assistant, restoring from a Time Machine backup, or moving a working drive to an external enclosure. Think of it as the alias equivalent of running Disk Utility's First Aid — a quick sanity check that costs nothing and catches problems before they cascade.
How does Alifix compare to alternatives?
No mainstream Mac utility targets alias repair specifically the way Alifix does — that is precisely the gap it fills.
General disk-maintenance tools like DiskWarrior, Drive Genius, or the built-in Disk Utility deal with filesystem integrity at the volume level; they will not hunt down a broken Finder alias. AppleScript or a shell script calling GetFileInfo can locate broken aliases, but writing and maintaining that script is work Alifix already does for you, with a proper UI. Path Finder and ForkLift surface broken aliases incidentally as you browse, but neither offers a dedicated batch-scan-and-repair workflow. Alifix stands alone in this niche.
What are the main limitations of Alifix?
Alifix does one thing — it does not manage symlinks, .webloc files, or Finder sidebar bookmarks. If your broken-link problem lives in those formats, you will need a different approach.
The utility is also inherently reactive: it repairs the aliases it finds, but it cannot prevent future breakage. And like any tool that writes to alias metadata, it should be used thoughtfully on system folders or app bundles where surprise modifications could cause problems. For routine project and document folders, though, the risk is negligible.
