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Vista To Get Symlinks?
TheRealSlimShady writes "According to a post by Ward Ralston on the Windows server team's weblog, Vista server is to get symlinks as part of the SMB2 protocol." From the post: "In Vista/Longhorn server, the file system (NTFS) will start supporting a new filesystem object (examples of existing filesystem objects are files, folders etc.). This new object is a symbolic link. Think of a symbolic link as a pointer to another file system object (it can be a file, folder, shortcut or another symbolic link)."
...is a compliment of the highest form.
I'm sure that's what those Plan9 folks are thinking of the Linux/BSD camp^_^
that in about 2 years time, everybody will be running around saying that MS developed it, and that *nix copied it. Just the way it works.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Doesn't really matter if Win2K could do it if the feature was buried and the user had no way to use it. Also, Sys Internals seems to imply that only directories may be linked, not specific files. Not quite the same thing.
I've been wishing Windows would support this elemental feature for a long time now. I would have used it to create a directory tree with the structure I wanted to burn on CD, without having to move all the actual files around. The CD burning software I've tried doesn't understand shortcuts either. Of course you can usually create the tree you want within the burning app. But then, you have to save it in their proprietary format, and some programs I've used manage to trash that info too.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
When shortcuts were invented for Win95 the Win32 API should have been built to treat a shortcut as the object it pointed to. That way they would have had real working links up front. Now they are going to be stuck with two types of link which work in different ways.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I don't believe that the word innovate was used anywhere except here on slashdot. While it's been a long time coming, the blog entry that originally posted this admits that all these additions are addressing limitations in SMB.
It's not like Linux never copied an idea from another OS, yet it seems MS is not allowed to add a feature unless they thought of it themselves.
But then I guess everyone here gets a bit bitter when there is one less thing to complain about MS.
No France
It's actually closer to 40 years.. but yeah :)
Rumors about real symbolic links in Windows have been swirling since before Win2000.
The problem with Junction.exe is that the Explorer shell and all other applications do not differentiate between links and real folders. That is, applications never expect two different paths to point to the same object, which makes Junctions much less useful in practice. For example, file search results take much longer to complete and display duplicate results. I believe that is why they initially limited Junctions to just directories.
Now, if Vista got persistent file handles, that would be interesting.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
and of course the plain old short cuts that are really symbolic links in the traditional unix world.
Try sharing that shortcut over Samba. Didn't work you say? Then, absolutely nothing UNIX-like about it.
The unfortunate part is people still think of DOS/Win95
I use Windows XP and it still has lots of shortcomings. However it's multimedia support is waay ahead of Linux, and I use my machine mainly for multimedia. So whatever criticism I may serve, that's based on WinXP and modern Redmond-OSes.
Give me a feature in Unix and Im sure there is an equivalent in NT.
You'd think any serious server-OS would implement this...
A reinstall with the textmode interface doesn't count.
For whatever reason, increased security, lightweight editions, added native FS support...
Just to list a few. I do however have a job to do :-D
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Backward compatibility is absolutely indispensable for Microsoft - the only reason it's still the market leader after all the lawsuits, bad publicity and downright talented competition of the last few years is because nobody wants to break compatibility with their existing software, documents, networks and hardware. Microsoft understands this, and while I'm sure it drives a lot of MS developers insane, backward compatibility is always given top priority, even if it makes the architecture horribly ugly and illogical.
(If you want to see the Unix equivalent, read the chapter on terminal I/O in Stevens' Advanced Programming for the UNIX Environment. There are backward compatibility hacks in there that are so ugly you'll wish you'd been born blind.)
The whole point of symbolic links is that they're transparent. That way, an application doesn't have to parse a .lnk file. The OS handles reading/writing from the correct file. Real file symlinks have been missing from Windows for too long, I think it's about time they were added. (Whether or not anybody actually uses them instead of shortcuts is another story.)
Man, I LOVE /. posters.
/. One of them describes a feature that's been in Windows since NT 3.1 (and exposed as a public API since Windows 2000) (symlinks). The other describes an existing feature that's been available for Windows since NT 4 and is now apparently being included in the OS base (SFU). And the third that describes a feature that's been available for Windows since NT 3.1 (and made really usable in XP) (limited rights user accounts).
:)
So you have three reports on
From these three technologies, all of which are over 10 years old, the poster decides that Microsoft rewrote the Vista OS based on BSD.
I love this forum
FAT filesystems have had hard links since the beginning, but CHKDSK doesn't like 'em... :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.