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Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2015 14:16:30 +0200
Message-ID: <CAGV6pnn_P1UNUXVW8sf1t==KePrxFUsW6JZrmQ2CrjZW0ce2yA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Is there a way to make an existing UNC symbolic link behave like a mount point?
From: Skarr Socrates <skarr DOT socrates AT gmail DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
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Hi all,
I am experiencing problems with a UNC symbolic link and how it is
interpreted by cygwin. The issue is as below:

* MachineA is a freebsd server (10.1-RELEASE-p9) with a simple
samba3.6 [homes] share.
* MachineB is a Windows 7 Ultimate, the user "bob" bsd home is not
mapped to a network drive, instead a symbolic link is made under
windows cmd:

C:\Users\Bob> mklink /D bsdhome  \\SOCRATES\bob

This setup has been working for over 2 years without problems, I
should mention also that Windows 7 sync center is used to keep bob's
freebsd files available even when he is not connected to the server
(not sure if this is relevant at all to the issue).

Recently, I installed cygwinx64 (CYGWIN_NT-6.1), all went very well,
the link "seem" to be recognized by cygwin.

bob AT machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob $ ls -l
[----cut----]
lrwxrwxrwx 1 bob None   XX XX XX XX:XX bsdhome -> //MACHINEB/bob/
[----cut----]

The problem I have is how to make cygwin somehow behave consistently
with respect to this link.

For instance, the bash builtin cd gives:

bob AT machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob/bsdhome $ cd ..
bob AT machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob $

However,
bob AT machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob $ touch file.txt
bob AT machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob/bsdhome $ cd bsdhome
bob AT machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob/bsdhome $ cp ../file.txt .
cp: cannot stat ‘../file.txt’: No such file or directory

Trying to do the same thing with windows/DOS cmd.exe works just fine.

To make sure that windows created symbolic links behaved consistently,
I created with the same process another symbolic link, but in this
case to a directory and not to a network share, and proceeded to do
the same copy. I couldn't reproduce the problem and the process was
successful in cygwin.

So as far as I came to fixing this problem, I found that cygwin
somehow interprets ".." in the case of a network share symbolic link
is actually pointing to //MACHINEB on the (//) virtual directory,
which made no sense to me as far as symbolic links go and even if it
did why would it work in the case of a normal directory...one too many
slashes? :-)

I understand the symptoms but I have no clue how to make this work or
if this is a feature or a bug. Is this related to the virtual
directory? can it be disabled?

I did go through the documentation and googled the life out of me
before posting here, the answer is probably too obvious and I can only
blame my inexperience with cygwin. Perhaps someone has faced a similar
situation, any help or hint would be much appreciated.

/Socrates.

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