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Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 20:39:34 +0000
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Subject: Re: Symbolic links problem with cygwin 1.7.1 in 64-bit Win7 Command  	Prompt
From: Andy Koppe <andy DOT koppe AT gmail DOT com>
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Lee Rothstein:
>> Will Windows junctions (for the path; plus the file name) work, here?

Don't think so, afaik junction points (introduced in Win2000, and
different from Vista/7 symlinks) work correctly for directories only.

Hard links, however, should work just fine for the problem at hand.


tuli tanssi:
> Actually, in Windows 7, Microsoft has implemented true symbolic links
> (as far as I know).
> Maybe it is also in Vista?
> Anyway, is that (microsoft's true symlinks) feature used in cygwin 1.7?
> Apparently not, since it would solve my problem.

Quoting Corinna Vinschen at
http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2009-11/msg00202.html:

"Cygwin 1.7 does recognize reparse points and especially
the new NTFS6 symlinks.  However, it only reads them, never writes them,
for the reasons repeated by cgf and me a couple of times.  You just
can't use them to store POSIX paths *and* allowing interoperability with
native Win32 processes, plus the nonsense of coupling them with a user
right, plus the super-nonsense only to allow Admins to create them by
default.  All that together makes them worse than Windows shortcuts and
they have not the faintest advantage over Cygwin-only symlinks
implemented as files with the SYSTEM DOS attribute set."

You could create a Windows symbolic link using the Windows 'mklink'
tool though, and it should work both in cmd.exe and in Cygwin.

Andy

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