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 To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com From: "Joe Smith" Subject: Re: RFE: removing symbolic link / windows shortcut duality Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 00:09:45 -0400 Lines: 26 Message-ID: References: <19670.4384325587$1123989182 AT news DOT gmane DOT org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-IsSubscribed: yes Well more on links: Because cygwin does use windows shortcuts as symbolic links, it will automaticly dereference windows links. If the link has a unix path in the description field cygwin will use that (or at least I think it uses it, it puts it there on its own links). Otherwise it uses the path information in the shortcut, and converts it to a unix path. Now a comment on relative linking and etc. There are two sections in a shortcut that that descibe where the target file is. One is optional (strictly both are, but such a shorcut would be useless). It is known as shellidlist. The other is a simple windows path. Shellidlist is always absolute. The path can be a relative path. Windows will use the shell id list if available falling back on the path. Therefore relative symbolic links are not relative (as far as windows cares) unless they lack the shellidlist section. The lack of the shelidlist is also what makes the lists uneditable in explorer.exe (as I alluded to in my previous message.) Now for some reason it seems that cygwin will sometimes create shortcuts with shellidlist, and othertimes without. (This may be system dependent, OS dependent, or perhaps a change between cygwin.dll versions. It really does not matter though. What we have right now works, and lets cygwin resolve shortcuts, and windows resolve cygwin's symbolic links, so just leave it alone. -- 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/