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Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 10:48:47 +0100
From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
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Subject: Re: Strange symlink behaviour
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On Mar  3 15:59, Alfred von Campe wrote:
> Do symbolic links work over CIFS?  I'm having a really strange
> problem with symlinks.  Here is the story.

Real symlinks on a remote CIFS system are not recognized by Cygwin or
Windows either.  Rather, they are converted to real files by the
underlying CIFS server so that "dumb" Windows clients don't get
confused.

Symlinks created with and for Cygwin are not real symlinks (with an
exception).  They are files with special properties so that they are
recognized as symlinks by Cygwin.

Bottom line is, if you create symlinks via Cygwin, they will only be
recognized by Cygwin clients.  If you want symlinks which work on all
systems (NFS->Linux, CIFS->Windows, CIFS->Cygwin), you have to create
the symlinks using a Linux client.

Here's the exception:  If you use Cygwin 1.7, and if you install the
Microsoft SFU NFS client on your Windows machine, you will be able to
create and utilize real symlinks on the NFS share.


Corinna

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

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