Mail Archives: cygwin/2001/02/27/13:28:06
At 11:43 AM 2/27/2001, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >> I am, as always, more concerned about supporting this feature in
> >> the long run. If allowing foo.lnk to be referenced explicitly causes
> >> even one person confusion, I don't think that it is worth it. It
> >> is certainly non-UNIX behavior.
> >
> >I think it's correct behaviour. Cygwin doesn't show the .lnk
> >suffix by itself but nevertheless, to return a `file not found'
> >on `ls foo.lnk' wouldn't be correct. It's simply the truth:
> >The file `foo.lnk' exists and is a symlink.
>
>Again, it is surprising behavior. Such a file would not exist on UNIX.
>I personally think that we should hide implementation details like
>"Oh yeah, we added a .lnk extension to all of our symbolic links"
>from the user. There is no reason for them to know or care about
>this detail.
Certainly Windows tries to take this tack, although I loathe to point to
them as an indication of what should be done. Personally, I've never
liked the notion of a file type being indicated by its extension though
so I'm always for something that removes this dependencies or makes it
transparent. Still, I'm pontificating, since I haven't looked at the code
or tried to see how/if this could be done in the context of Windows
shortcuts. Overall, while I like the inter-operability gains, bring
Windows semantics into UNIXy symbolic links will be a problem.
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