To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: Andrew DeFaria <Andrew AT DeFaria DOT com>
Subject: Symlinks and sharing a home directory between Windows and Linux
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:33:46 -0800
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I like having only one home directory. It's extremely convenient to have 
the same settings and the like both when on Cygwin and when on Linux.

Often home directories are on NAS's and the like and served out via smb.

Somewhere along the line Cygwin's symlink implementation changed again. 
It used to be that symlinks ended in .lnk, which was sort of a pain but 
workable. One nice thing is that they didn't clash with Linux symlinks. 
A Cygwin symlink is not the same as a Linux symlink and so you could have:

$ ln -s a_file.txt link1 # in Cygwin
$ ln -s a_file.txt link1 # in Linux

and you'd end up having a symlink with the same name, link1, pointing to 
the same file from either Cygwin or Linux. This is because the Linux 
symlink is named just "link1" and the Cygwin symlink is named "link1.txt".

But now Cygwin names its symlink "link1". When you then log into Linux 
and try to access that link it doesn't work.

Where this is happening for me is that I put all of my rc files under 
~/.rc and then I symlink them to ~ as appropriate. So, for example I 
have a ~/.rc/inputrc. I then symlink them to ~/.inputrc. Under the old 
scenario I'd get a ~/.inputrc.lnk for Cygwin and a ~/.inputrc on Linux. 
Under the new scenario I get a clash.

Is there any way around this?


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