Tag Archive for 'windows sysmlink'

symlinks on windows – sysinternals’ junctions

Update: This is now obso­lete since Win­dows Vista/7 includes the mklink util­ity. Usage of this util­ity can be found below

I found out about this neat util­ity, junc­tions from sys­in­ter­nals, that can create sym­links on Win­dows. In Win­dows they are called junc­tions, which unfor­tu­nately only work on direc­to­ries. But that is still better than making short­cuts (as cygwin’s ln -s imple­men­ta­tion cur­rently does).

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$ ln -s [target] [link]
> junction [link] [target]

> rem The new mklink utility built into Windows Vista/7
> mklink /d [link] [target]

One great thing about this util­ity is its com­pact­ness. Packed in less than 100kb it can be installed by just copy­ing it over to a direc­tory in PATH, which is a quan­tum leap of con­ve­nience over the clum­si­ness that pre­vented me from using Microsoft’s offi­cial linkd that just has to come bun­dled with the heavy Win­dows Server 2003 Resource Kit.




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