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).

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.