Symbolic Links

[Elliott Wilcoxon]

NTFS also supports hard links, and there's a program that comes with 
Windows that lets you make them (searching WinXP Pro's Help and Support 
Center for 'hardlink' gives the relevant entries).  The result would 
then be that it would work in both Cygwin and Windows (all programs), 
although it can be confusing if you're not used to thinking of file 
system-y stuff.

Elliott Wilcoxon

Brian Dessent wrote:

> Dan Adams wrote:
> 
>>My question was, is there any way to use the cygwin links, not the windows
>>ones, to also be able to work in the open dialog box in MS Office products
>>like excel for example. As I said, it is working in windows explorer. The
>>only reason why I was mentioning about the windows links is because they
>>were working in excel and I figured it would be a good example.
> 
> 
> If your filesystem is NTFS (and $deity hope it is, as FAT32 hurts like
> something awful) then you can try fooling around with its built in
> symbolic links, which are called junctions in the parlance.  There are
> no built-in tools to do this but the venerable Mark Russinovich again
> comes to the rescue with his freeware: 
> 
> from <http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/misc.shtml#junction>:
> 
> Junction
> 
> Win2K's version of NTFS supports directory symbolic links, where a
> directory serves as a symbolic link to another directory on the
> computer. For example, if the directory D:\SYMLINK specified
> C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32 as its target, then an application accessing
> D:\SYMLINK\DRIVERS would in reality be accessing
> C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS. Directory symbolic links are known as NTFS
> junctions in Win2K. Unfortunately, Win2K comes with no tools for
> creating junctions - you have to purchase the Win2K Resource Kit, which
> comes the linkd program for creating junctions. I therefore decided to
> write my own junction-creating tool: Junction. Junction not only allows
> you to create NTFS junctions, it allows you to see if files or
> directories are actually reparse points. Reparse points are the
> mechanism on which NTFS junctions are based, and they are used by
> Win2K's Remote Storage Service (RSS), as well as volume mount points. 
> 
> If you want to view reparse information, the usage for Junction is the
> following: 
> 
> Usage: junction [-s] <directory or file name> 
> 
> -s	Recurse subdirectories. 
> 
> If you want to create or delete a junction, use Junction like this: 
> 
> Usage: junction [-d] <junction directory> [<junction target>] 
> 
> To delete a junction specify the -d switch and the junction name. 
> 
> Download Junction (16KB) 
> 
> Download Junction Source (22 KB) 
> 
> 
> I have not tried this but it sounds like it might be helpful for you.  I
> have no idea how Cygwin would interact with one of these, but since it's
> layered on top of Windows' kernel NTFS driver I would expect that it
> would treat them just as any other app would, i.e. do the right thing.
> 
> Brian
> 
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