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Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 10:17:27 -0400
To: Mellman Thomas <Thomas DOT Mellman AT icn DOT siemens DOT de>, cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: "Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc)" <lhall AT rfk DOT com>
Subject: Re: using Windows links
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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


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