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Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 21:09:03 +0100
From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
To: "'Cygwin List'" <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: Re: possible for win32 links to work as cygwin links?
Message-ID: <20050125200903.GE31117@cygbert.vinschen.de>
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On Jan 25 11:44, linda w wrote:
> Forgive me if this has been covered somewhere, but I was
> wondering if a setting could be added in CYGWIN, to process
> "windows links" [.lnk] files as "cygwin" links.  Is this
> possible?

No, it's not.

> It sure would be handy to have the linux utils like find
> and readlink to work on win-links and run cleanup jobs on
> one's system to search for "stale" link.
> 
> It is very useful to have cygwin links work in the 'win32 env,
> it would be equally useful to have an option to have win32 links
> work in cygwin [if it is doable and not too much bother...].

It is partly doable and the first implementation in Cygwin even did that.
But it results in a problem.  Windows shortcuts may contain a couple of
extra information which just have nothing to do with the pure path
information.  If these shortcuts are treated like symlinks, it becomes
impossible to make backups of Windows shortcuts using Cygwin tools like
tar.  Today, tar treats Windows shortcuts as normal files.  If tar just
can see the symlink part, the extracted shortcut wouldn't be very similar
to what has been archived.


Corinna

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

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