FUSE, symbolic links and special files

[Bill Zissimopoulos]

On 8/25/16, 7:14 PM, Jeffrey Altman wrote:

>On 8/25/2016 11:21 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>Granted, it *could* be used by Cygwin on NTFS to indicate Cygwin's own
>> implementations of AF_LOCAL sockets or fifos.  Or even for symlinks.
>> But that would only introduce YA symlink type which would be unusable
>> from non-Cygwin applications.
>
>Correct.
>
>With its own reparse tag Cygwin could store exactly the same metadata it
>stores today in the data stream of the .lnk file as reparse tag data.
>The benefit of applying a reparse tag is that the .lnk will no longer be
>confused for a regular file.   On file systems that do not support
>reparse points it can continue to store the data in the data stream.

I agree with Jeffrey, and I did think of this as a potential solution for
FUSE for Cygwin (and perhaps Cygwin itself).

But since I learned about the NFS reparse points I find them a very good
solution, especially because they indicate that someone in Microsoft has
already thought about this problem.

Bill