How to repair the symlinks in a copied cygwin64 tree

[Mark Geisert]

Hi David,

On 8/7/2024 1:26 PM, David Karr via Cygwin wrote:
> At my work, I had to have my laptop reimagined for various reasons. I had
> them save my cygwin64 tree to external storage first. I now have the laptop
> back, and I copied the entire tree back in, but now I realize I should have
> done this differently, and I'm wondering how best to repair this. Some of
> you can probably guess, but now all of the files that were symlinks in
> Cygwin are now very small data files. I can tell they used to be symlinks
> because when I cat one, it shows "!<symlink>" in the first characters.
> 
> What is the best strategy for repairing this? The most simple-minded
> approach that I can see is simply renaming the cygwin64 tree to get it out
> of the way, and then just reinstalling Cygwin, and then copying in all the
> files in my cygwin home directory in the saved tree. I will likely guess
> wrong on what packages I had installed before. Is there some way I can
> simply repair the symylink files directly?

If the path to Windows' attrib.exe is in your path (use 'which attrib' 
to check) then you can simply 'attrib +I +S <filename>' the file that 
contains "!<symlink>".

> Besides the symlink problem, is there anything else that I might have
> broken by doing it this way?

That I don't know.

> I'm guessing the correct way to have done this would have been instead
> storing the "tar czpf" output in external storage. I think that would have
> preserved the symlinks and restored them properly with "tar xzf".

That looks good OK me but I've never had to try it, so YMMV.
HTH,

..mark