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Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2003 11:56:10 +0200
From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Problem with dereference option on Windows LNKs (shortcuts)
Message-ID: <20030713095610.GT12368@cygbert.vinschen.de>
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References: <3F10A435 DOT 3090504 AT pomona DOT k12 DOT ca DOT us> <Pine DOT GSO DOT 4 DOT 44 DOT 0307122059500 DOT 13817-100000 AT slinky DOT cs DOT nyu DOT edu>
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On Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 09:05:52PM -0400, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Jul 2003, Dan Mellem wrote:
> > This problem isn't specific to 'cp.' E.g., 'less' will work on an 'ln'
> > shortcut but not a normal MS-Windows shortcut.
> >
> > I'm using Cygwin v1.3.22 (Mar 18, 2003) on MS-Windows 2000.
> 
> Cygwin symlinks are a bit more than read-only shortcut (.lnk) files.
> They have a special format, and they also have something in their
> "Comment" field (that you can check via shortcut properties).  In short,
> you cannot easily create a Cygwin symlink from outside Cygwin.  For exact
> details, see the source of the symlink() function in
> winsup/cygwin/path.cc.
> 	Igor

Well, it's a bit different.  Actually the Cygwin shortcuts are pretty
simple.  They only contain the information needed to point to something
else.  Shortcuts created by native Windows apps (like Explorer) OTOH
might contain a lot more of information, e.g. the working directory,
an icon, etc.  If Cygwin would handle these native shortcuts like any
other symlink, you would have a problem.  For instance, you couldn't 
archive these shortcuts into tar archives and keep all the information
in them.  After unpacking, these shortcuts would be no different than
standard Cygwin shortcut symlinks, so they would have lost all these
extra information.

The problem:  We can do it either one way or the other, we would never
satisfy everyone.

Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer                                mailto:cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat, Inc.

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