Strange symlink behaviour

Alfred von Campe alfred@von-campe.com
Thu Mar 4 11:49:00 GMT 2010


> Real symlinks on a remote CIFS system are not recognized by Cygwin or
> Windows either.  Rather, they are converted to real files by the
> underlying CIFS server so that "dumb" Windows clients don't get
> confused.

Ah, that makes sense and explains some behavior I was seeing.

> Symlinks created with and for Cygwin are not real symlinks (with an
> exception).  They are files with special properties so that they are
> recognized as symlinks by Cygwin.

Does that also apply to a symlink extracted from a tar file created  
on Linux?

> Bottom line is, if you create symlinks via Cygwin, they will only be
> recognized by Cygwin clients.  If you want symlinks which work on all
> systems (NFS->Linux, CIFS->Windows, CIFS->Cygwin), you have to create
> the symlinks using a Linux client.

That's what I was afraid of.  My real issue is that this all works  
when I extract the tar ball into an empty directory, but it doesn't  
when the symlink already exists and a short cut is created instead.   
If the "rm //path/to/share/*" would simply delete the symlink I would  
not be having this problem.  Wait, a thought just occurred to me.   
What if I delete the symlink first instead of deleting "*".  I'll try  
this when I get to work today and report back with the results.

Vielen Dank,
Alfred


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