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Re: using Windows links


At 09:50 AM 4/30/2002, Mellman Thomas wrote:
>I know this has been discussed quite a bit from various angles, but
>after hours of searching through the mail archive, I can't seem to
>find the angle that's important to me.
>
>I can create fine shortcuts with ln -s which are accessible by Windows,
>but I can't seem to be able to use Windows Shortcuts with Cygwin.
>
>I might have resignedly accepted this as a consequence of having a
>great interface on a crummy os, except that I *could* follow Window's
>shortcuts before I just upgraded to 1.3.10.
>
>For example, there are all kinds of shortcuts scattered around my filesystem
>which have been installed by my company's tools which I used to be able to
>call from bash and put in the background.  Then I could Alt-tab to that window
>and use the keyboard.  Or, do an ls -l on them and see where they point to.
>Since 1.3.10, that doesn't work anymore: now I've always got to go reaching for the mouse.
>
>An interesting side effect: I have a shortcut (Desktop.lnk) on my $HOME
>that was originally created by Windows.  I can't cd there anymore.  I tried
>to create a second link for Cygwin (Desktop), but ln tells me it already
>exists!
>
>$ ln -s $nt/Desktop Desktop
>/bin/ln: creating symbolic link `Desktop' to `/cygdrive/c/WINNT/Profiles/mt099378/Desktop': File exists
>
>Thus, even though Desktop.lnk isn't recognized as anything special, it
>is anyway!


Just because it isn't recognized as a Cygwin symbolic link doesn't mean it
doesn't exist as a file as far as Cygwin is concerned.

I guess you missed the discussion in the email archives (was it at 
cygwin-developers?) about the problems of following shortcuts made by
Windows as symbolic links.  I won't review them here but suffice it to 
say that treating Windows created shortcuts as symbolic links is a whole
lot of trouble.  Initial implementation of Cygwin symlinks as shortcuts 
ignored this issue (because it wasn't known to be a problem).  The current
implementation only follows Cygwin-created (via ln -s) shortcuts as a result.  
You probably had a previous version of Cygwin which implemented shortcuts as 
symlinks before these problems were noticed.  Sorry but this is the new 
state of things.


Larry Hall                              lhall@rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      http://www.rfk.com
838 Washington Street                   (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
Holliston, MA 01746                     (508) 893-9889 - FAX


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