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Re: Serious brokeness of treating .lnk files as symlinks


On Sat, May 26, 2001 at 12:38:32PM +0400, Andrej Borsenkow wrote:
>>A more serious problem is that if I use tar to archive .lnk files, they
>>are not restored properly.  They started as 'fat' links, and get
>>restored as 'skinny' links.  This new behaviour means that no cygwin
>>tool will be able to handle backing up .lnk files properly.
>>
>
>I am afraid there is no solution without breaking compatibility.  On
>Unix symlink does not have any "contents" except the file name it
>points to.  So, tar saves just this filename.  This allows tar archive
>to be moved to any other compliant system.  If you tar your files on
>Cygwin and restore them on Unix you get identical filesystem structure
>including symlinks.

If you archive a symbolic link, you should restore a symbolic link.  I don't
know what a "fat" link or a "skinny" link may be but that is how it is supposed
to work.  It should create a symlink using the current method for creating
symlinks.

The current problem with .lnks is what we call in the industry "a bug" and it
will be fixed in the next release.

cgf

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