when to use a ln or a mount

[Matthew Woehlke]

zzapper wrote:
> Hi,
> In my confused mind ln and mount seem to achieve the same thing.
> In my case I want to have an easy to type path(s) to my old pc
> 
> so I typed:-
> 
> mount -f -u -b "//dell25/c/" "/o"
> 
> but I also tested
> 
> ln -s //dell25/c/ /old
> 
> In the Cygwin context does one method have any advatanges over the over?

One is probably faster (meaning how long it takes to resolve the Cygwin 
path to one Windows understands), though I couldn't tell you which. Also 
unless you are running configure scripts, or doing something else that 
needs to do such conversions thousands of times, quickly, you won't 
notice a difference.

In the UNIX world the convention is to use symlinks often and binds 
infrequently (although I wouldn't consider this particular case a 
"bind"). There is also a limit to the number of mounts you can do on Cygwin.

In this case, what you are doing is effective to mounting a remote file 
system, so "mount" would be traditional (and also your only choice on 
most UNIX's, which don't understand UNC paths). However, as you've 
noticed, either one works on Cygwin. :-)

-- 
Matthew
Emacs is a nice OS - but it lacks a good text editor.
That's why I am using Vim.  -- Anonymous


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