Subject: Re: using Windows links
From: Sam Edge <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 02 May 2002 16:26:29 +0100

Mellman Thomas wrote in
<BE684E2C997AD51199530002A56B20796C3644@MCHH2A1E>
on Thu, 2 May 2002 16:53:06 +0200:

> There's no h.lnk here.
> Is this just a question of having the right frame-of-mind?

Yes there is. In the same way that the Windows shell always hides the
".lnk" suffix, cygwin1.dll hides it for Cygwin-generated Windows
shorcuts- and only for Cygwin-generated shortcuts. (Cygwin-generated
ones have the read-only FAT/NTFS attribute set as a first clue and
have a marker in them to tell Cygwin that they're symlinks not just
shortcuts.)

If you don't like this, then put "nowinsymlinks" in your CYGWIN
environment variable and ln -s will create old-style Cygwin symlink
files (without any extension) instead of Windows shortcuts.

An example;
$ echo $CYGWIN
binmode ntsec notitle check_case:adjust
$ ln -s "../RFC Copies/rfc0768.txt" .
$ ls -l rfc0768.txt 
lrwxrwxrwx    1 SamEdge  None          130 Apr 29 17:11 rfc0768.txt ->
../RFC copies/rfc0768.txt
$ ls -l rfc0768.txt.lnk
lrwxrwxrwx    1 SamEdge  None          130 Apr 29 17:11
rfc0768.txt.lnk -> ../RFC copies/rfc0768.txt

Looking using CMD.EXE there is only one file "rfc0768.txt.lnk" and
with Explorer you see one file "rfc0768.txt" as a shortcut. (You don't
see the extension in Explorer even with the option to see extension
enabled because HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.lnk has a default value "lnkfile"
in the registry and HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lnkfile contains an empty string
value called "NeverShowExt." Here ends the Windows shell tutorial.)
;-)

-- 
Sam Edge

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