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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."

8 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Shorter titles are Sweeter by Hexstream · · Score: 5, Funny

    Vista's limited.

    --
    Theory is often inaccurate(TM)
  2. obligatory quote by laurent420 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." -Henry Spencer

  3. Re:Shortcuts are nothing new by kimvette · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
  4. I don't think they get it by value_added · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Obligatory rebuttal by Tim+C · · Score: 5, Funny

    "A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire.

  6. don't use NTFS by drgonzo59 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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...

    1. Re:don't use NTFS by mrchaotica · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Is it possible to run all of Windows on EXT3?

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  7. Only on Slashdot... by StarkRG · · Score: 5, Funny

    Only on Slashdot can a first post be redundant...