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

[wesnerm]

Your information about MS half-baked implementation of links only applies to Windows XP. Vista introduced true UNIX-style symbolic links in addition to the junctions introduced in earlier versions of NTFS. The new links were incorporated from Windows Services for UNIX. See my posts on Vista Symbolic Links from a month ago. http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2006/10/ symbolic_links_.html http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2006/10/ symbolic_links__1.html

Windows' FS / the alternate universe story

[drgonzo59]

Window's file system has always been screwed up. Too many unnecessary attributes (remember all those times when you tried to delete the file it won't let you, saying it is in use), then drive letters are just silly and bunch of other problems.

The legacy software is both a blessing and a curse for Microsoft. They cannot break legacy code but Apple gambled and did it, and I think it succeeded. Subjectively I know more and more people who ditch their Windows machines for Macs or even Linux.

Now imagine in a parallel universe where MS decided that instead of NT or Windows XP they would just base their next OS on a compatible freely available Unix system (a *BSD for example ;). They probably would not have had to work as hard as they did writing a new NT kernel from scratch. We probably would not have had Macs and Linux-es today like we do. Microsoft could have released very cheap versions of it's OS for home and personal use ($35/pop so that the most avid pirate would rather buy it than waste time downloading it, and to make sure every child grows up immersed in a windows environment). They would have a great (free) kernel that would be secure, a powerful network stack that doesn't suck and a almost default free server that they could offer their corporate clients. Instead of supporting old legacy software they could have had some virtualization or emulation more for old DOS programs and so on. If that had happened 10 years on they would have had total monopoly in the OS market.

Today the best move MS could make is probably embrace Linux(Unix) with all they've got. They could make their own free *nix distro (yeah, I know Novel's Suse...), make it easy to install and run Windows software on that (something of a fast and reliable Wine). I bet a lot of the Linux crowd would jump ship quickly if they could play DVDs, mp3's, run Photoshop and Office on it, while still having their command prompt, the network stack and ext3/XFS etc. But Windows is still hesitating, it is a giant that has got a huge momentum and can't just stop and turn in the Unix direction, although it sure is starting to look in its direction...