Vista's Limited Symlinks

An anonymous reader writes, "Symlinks haven't really been added to Windows Vista. It seems that the calls to the Windows Vista symlink API only occur during the creation of such files or when accessing them from Windows Explorer. What this means is, you can't access symlinks from another OS. To be fair, you probably didn't expect to be able to dual-boot into XP and suddenly have access to the symlinks you created on the Vista partition earlier that day. But then again, you probably expected to be able to access these symlinks through a network share/UNC path or as files on a webserver. But you can't." From the article: "Clearly, Vista's symlink API isn't complete — hopefully this is something that can be patched via a hotfix and that we don't have to wait for Fiji to get something as simple as UNC support built in."

Comments

Re:Shortcuts are nothing new

[kimvette]

No, what is being discussed here is links, e.g., creating an additional filename referencing an inode.

http://win32.mvps.org/ntfs/lnw.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=34 1355

NTFS does support links, but as usual from Microsoft, it's half-baked and only the bare minimum required for POSIX compliance was implemented. From sysinternals (now a Microsoft site) you can download a utility for manipulating NTFS links, or you can install the free Services for Unix (again, from Microsoft's web site) to get the M$ version of ln.

don't use NTFS

[drgonzo59]

Ext3 has great symlink support ;)

Try this and a ext3 file system. I have all my Documents and the whole user directory on an ext3 and it works great. I can also access it from Linux if I want...