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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."
Windows 2000 promised administrators the ability to manage everything from the command-line. That turned out to be true mostly for a small list-of-old-DOS-utilities value of true. Additionally, we were offered junctions/mount-points which sortofkindof worked, but weren't fully supported. Sysinternals offered their 'junction' utility which worked a bit better, but again, not really. Now with Vista have SFU or SFU-as-subsystem that promises everything that Windows Scripting Host promised and more!
I expect that whatever hodge-podge of new features, one-off Resource Kit utilities or whatever else Microsoft decides to offer in their latest and greatest, I'll continue to rely on the folks at Cygwin to take advantage of whatever limited functionality exists in Windows, and then implement workarounds for the inconsistencies and shortcomings to make something useful and sane with it. In the meantime, I'll bet my right monad that a future Slashdot headline will read Vista's Borked NFS Client.