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No operating sytem that I know of supports hard links across device boundaries. Symbolic links are really the right solution there, and that many apps don't wor
by aristidb 15y ago
No operating sytem that I know of supports hard links across device boundaries. Symbolic links are really the right solution there, and that many apps don't work with them is a shame.
- rbanffy 15y ago> and that many apps don't work with them is a shame. shouldn't a fopen work seamlessly with symlinks? Shouldn't it be dealt with at the filesystem level instead?
- georgieporgie 15y agoYou're right, I misspoke. I have to revise my statements a bit. On Windows, there are hard links, junction points (I believe they're the same, junction points are for directories), symbolic links, and shortcuts. Junction points only work for local NTFS drives. Shortcuts work on anything, pointing to anything, but they're just .lnk files and an app has to know how to process them. Here's the kicker: you basically can't create a symbolic link in Windows unless you're running as Administrator! There's even an option to enable symlinking in the Local Security Policy, but it doesn't actually work (a known bug since, I believe, Win Vista)! The 'runas' command (basically, sudo) can't really be used, though perhaps it works if you create a 'real' Administrator account (by default, there isn't one that you can log into). So, you can create a symbolic link to a file on a network file system, but not to a directory. And you'll have to run as Administrator to make it happen at all. I'm sure that's more than you ever wanted to know about Windows and links. :-)