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From:	"Mellem, Dan" <Dan DOT Mellem AT pomona DOT k12 DOT ca DOT us>
To:	"'Max Bowsher'" <maxb AT ukf DOT net>, cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject:	RE: Problem with dereference option on Windows LNKs (shortcuts)
Date:	Mon, 14 Jul 2003 14:22:47 -0700
MIME-Version:	1.0

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Max Bowsher  On: 7/14/03 2:08 PM
> 
> 
> Mellem, Dan wrote:
> > From: Igor Pechtchanski On: 7/12/03 6:05 PM
> >> Cygwin symlinks are a bit more than read-only shortcut 
> (.lnk) files.
> >> They have a special format, and they also have something in their
> >> "Comment" field (that you can check via shortcut 
> properties).  In short,
> >> you cannot easily create a Cygwin symlink from outside Cygwin.  For
> >> exact details, see the source of the symlink() function in
> >> winsup/cygwin/path.cc.
> >> Igor
> >
> > Thanks, Igor. I thought that since it created 
> MS-Windows-compatable .LNKs,
> > it also read regular .LNKs and used them as symlinks.
> >
> > I took a look at the source
> >
> > (http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/src/winsup/cygwi
n/path.cc?cvsr
> > oot=src) but didn't find anything specific that said that they aren't
> > treated as symlinks. I'm not familiar with the source but there was a
> > section:
[snip code]
> > I don't know what this all means but it implies to me that it will at
least
> > attempt to read the shortcut file. Is it possible to parse through
regular
> > shortcut files too?
> 
> Possible to write code to do this? Yes, of course, but probably not
> desirable, see below.
> Possible to set an option to cause this? No, not currently, and probably
> never.
> 
> Importantly, a Cygwin symlink contains a *POSIX* path. The fact that the
> symlink is also a windows shortcut is essentially just decoration.
> Obviously, a normal shortcut does not contain a POSIX path. It would
> probably be possible to deduce one, but there are good reasons for not
doing
> so: Extra data (icon, etc.) would be removed when shortcuts were saved and
> restored with tar, for example.

Oh, I see. A utility to convert Shortcuts to symlinks would be very useful
for this. I'm going to try to hack something up in PERL with the
Win32::Shortcut module I found but I still need to find the file layout for
the symlinks.

Thanks for all the help.

-Dan

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