Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Message-Id: <4.3.1.2.20020430100639.02cf9b80@pop.ma.ultranet.com> X-Sender: lhall AT pop DOT ma DOT ultranet DOT com Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 10:17:27 -0400 To: Mellman Thomas , cygwin AT cygwin DOT com From: "Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc)" Subject: Re: using Windows links In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 09:50 AM 4/30/2002, Mellman Thomas wrote: >I know this has been discussed quite a bit from various angles, but >after hours of searching through the mail archive, I can't seem to >find the angle that's important to me. > >I can create fine shortcuts with ln -s which are accessible by Windows, >but I can't seem to be able to use Windows Shortcuts with Cygwin. > >I might have resignedly accepted this as a consequence of having a >great interface on a crummy os, except that I *could* follow Window's >shortcuts before I just upgraded to 1.3.10. > >For example, there are all kinds of shortcuts scattered around my filesystem >which have been installed by my company's tools which I used to be able to >call from bash and put in the background. Then I could Alt-tab to that window >and use the keyboard. Or, do an ls -l on them and see where they point to. >Since 1.3.10, that doesn't work anymore: now I've always got to go reaching for the mouse. > >An interesting side effect: I have a shortcut (Desktop.lnk) on my $HOME >that was originally created by Windows. I can't cd there anymore. I tried >to create a second link for Cygwin (Desktop), but ln tells me it already >exists! > >$ ln -s $nt/Desktop Desktop >/bin/ln: creating symbolic link `Desktop' to `/cygdrive/c/WINNT/Profiles/mt099378/Desktop': File exists > >Thus, even though Desktop.lnk isn't recognized as anything special, it >is anyway! Just because it isn't recognized as a Cygwin symbolic link doesn't mean it doesn't exist as a file as far as Cygwin is concerned. I guess you missed the discussion in the email archives (was it at cygwin-developers?) about the problems of following shortcuts made by Windows as symbolic links. I won't review them here but suffice it to say that treating Windows created shortcuts as symbolic links is a whole lot of trouble. Initial implementation of Cygwin symlinks as shortcuts ignored this issue (because it wasn't known to be a problem). The current implementation only follows Cygwin-created (via ln -s) shortcuts as a result. You probably had a previous version of Cygwin which implemented shortcuts as symlinks before these problems were noticed. Sorry but this is the new state of things. Larry Hall lhall AT rfk DOT com RFK Partners, Inc. http://www.rfk.com 838 Washington Street (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office Holliston, MA 01746 (508) 893-9889 - FAX -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/