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Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 12:02:31 +0100
From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Support planned for vista symbolic links?
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On Jan 28 13:38, Shankar Unni wrote:
> This article from Mark "Sysinternals" Russinovitch discusses the new 
> "real" symbolic link feature in Vista ("real" in that it's classic 
> Unix-style, where the symlink is interpreted on the local OS, even for 
> links in mounted shares, and can refer to either a file or a directory):
> 
> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/02/VistaKernel/default.aspx#S4
> 
> The only catch he mentions is that you need a special privilege to 
> create these symlinks, and that privilege is only granted to 
> administrators by default. (Usual windows reason: to "protect" users 
> from tools that are not symbolic-link-aware)
> 
> Anyway: is any support planned in cygwin and/or coreutils for this 
> feature?  (specifically, supporting symlink(), S_ISLNK support in stat, 
> etc.)

See the snapshots.  The next major Cygwin release will be able to read
native NTFS symlinks and treats them as symlinks.  However, it's not
planned to utilize native NTFS symlinks when creating symlinks in
Cygwin.  This has two reasons.

One is the above mentioned non-sensical restriction that only users with
a special privilege may create native symlinks.

The other one is that native symlinks on remote Vista shares are not
implemented transparently to non-Vista client machines trying to access
a Vista share.  An XP client can not access the target file of the
symlink by opening it.

Frustrating, isn't it?


Corinna

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

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