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Date:	Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:16:45 -0500
From:	"Jan Hlavacek" <jhlavace AT svsu DOT edu>
To:	<cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject:	Re: odd behavior of symlinks on Win XP
Mime-Version:	1.0

Hi,

I am not on the list, but I hope this will get through.  I came across
this discussion while I was searching for an answer to similar problem. 
Maybe describing my experience will help you figure out what is going
on.  Unfortunately, I have absolutely no experience with windows
programming, so I can only help as a tester. 

Anyway, I use the latest cygwin (1.5.something, I just upgraded
yesterday), and this is what happens with my symlinks:

1) create a symlink: ln -s yady yada
2) now I can do ls yada, cd yada etc.
3) open current directory in explorer, the icon for yada is the default
"unknown file" icon, but uther than that, it works. 
4) try to change the icon of yada, doesn't work because yada is
readonly, uncheck the readonly option, change the icon and apply. 
5) go back to bash.  Now yada is gone, there is yada.lnk instead. In
addition, cd yada.lnk doesn't work. 
6) renaming yada.lnk to yada doesn't help.

I think the problem in part 5 is related to the following problem. 
According to the cygwin FAQ at cygwin.com/faq/
cygwin should understand explorer's shortcuts:

------- begin text pasted from the FAQ:

"Question: Why can't I cd into a shortcut to a directory?

Answer: This is only valid up to but not including version 1.3.0:

Cygwin does not follow MS Windows Explorer Shortcuts (*.lnk files). It
sees a shortcut as a regular file and this you cannot "cd" into it.

Some people have suggested replacing the current symbolic link scheme
with shortcuts. The major problem with this is that .LNK files would
then be used to symlink Cygwin paths that may or may not be valid under
native Win32 non-Cygwin applications such as Explorer.

Since version 1.3.0, Cygwin treats shortcuts as symlinks. "

------- end text pasted from the FAQ

I found this not to be the case on Win XP.  As mentioned above, I have
cygwin 1.5.something and I *cannot* cd to explorer shortcuts.  Also ls
just shows the shortcut as a file, instead of listing the directory. 
Aparently MS did something in XP that break the compatibility of cygwin
with explorer shortcuts. 

-- 
Jan Hlavacek
Department of Mathematics
964-2004

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