Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin@cygwin.com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin@cygwin.com From: "Gary R. Van Sickle" To: Subject: RE: Why do symlinks need to be system files Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 00:37:13 -0500 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165 Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <00bc01c3401c$9f0a7330$9b67883e@pomello> > Mark R. wrote: > > Hello, > > > > I've been busy attempting to use WinInstaller LE to create an MSI package > > of cygwin so we can automatically deploy a customized build for our > > department. This works for the most part, however when I deploy this to a > > windows XP machine, all of the symlinks are broken. Ex/ vi doesn't work, > > however vim does. > > > > When I tracked down the problem, it appears that symlinks require the > > "system file" attribute to be set. Does anyone know why this is? > > Because that's part of how Cygwin recognizes them as symlinks. To expand on that a bit, it's so Cygwin doesn't have to open and parse the actual contents of every file it sees on a path to see if it's a symlink; it only has to check those marked as system. Since it's rare to find many files marked system normally, this results in mega-savings speedwise. Now if Microsoft would only get hip to this whole symlink thing.... -- Gary R. Van Sickle Brewer. Patriot. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/