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Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 12:49:02 +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  4 06:41, Alfred von Campe wrote:
> >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.
> 
> Ah, that makes sense and explains some behavior I was seeing.
> 
> >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.
> 
> Does that also apply to a symlink extracted from a tar file created
> on Linux?

Yes.  And that makes sense.  Think about it.

> >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.
> 
> That's what I was afraid of.  My real issue is that this all works
> when I extract the tar ball into an empty directory, but it doesn't
> when the symlink already exists and a short cut is created instead.
> If the "rm //path/to/share/*" would simply delete the symlink I
> would not be having this problem.  Wait, a thought just occurred to
> me.  What if I delete the symlink first instead of deleting "*".
> I'll try this when I get to work today and report back with the
> results.

What you can do is to switch 1.5 to "CYGWIN=nowinsymlinks", the default
in 1.7.  This creates files which have no .lnk suffix, but the SYSTEM
DOS bit set.  This has two other problems, though.

- The CIFS filesystems will have to support DOS attributes.
- The symlink is still no real symlink since that's not supported
  in CIFS for Windows clients.  It's just some file which is only
  recognized as symlink by Cygwin.


Corinna

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

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