Is there a way to make an existing UNC symbolic link behave like a mount point?

Corinna Vinschen corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com
Mon Apr 20 09:31:00 GMT 2015


On Apr 19 14:16, Skarr Socrates wrote:
> Hi all,
> I am experiencing problems with a UNC symbolic link and how it is
> interpreted by cygwin. The issue is as below:
> [...]
> However,
> bob@machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob $ touch file.txt
> bob@machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob/bsdhome $ cd bsdhome
> bob@machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob/bsdhome $ cp ../file.txt .
> cp: cannot stat ‘../file.txt’: No such file or directory
> [...]
> I understand the symptoms but I have no clue how to make this work or
> if this is a feature or a bug. Is this related to the virtual
> directory? can it be disabled?

No.  This is a long standing misbehaviour of Cygwin.  The problem is in
the core path handling routine, which evaluates paths from tail to head
component rather than vice versa, as required by POSIX.

The original authors probably implemented it this way for speed, and the
drawbacks (as above) were only found much later.

Why did we never changed that?  Because the core path handling routines
are long-winded, complicated, and probably the most crucial part of the
DLL.  Nobody dared to rip it apart yet, but that's what would be
required.

I'm sorry if that doesn't help you, but that's as it is right now,
unfortunately.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat
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