RE: Hardlinks/SymLinks in the vfat filesystem?

Jeremy Fitzhardinge (jeremy@goop.org)
Thu, 04 Feb 1999 13:25:09 -0800 (PST)


On 04-Feb-99 Riley Williams wrote:
> Can I ask whether Hardlinks or SymLinks are supposed to work in the
> vfat file system?

No. Vfat doesn't have any notion remotely related to symlinks or hard links.

> My own thoughts is that one or the other of these are pretty much
> identical to what Win9x calls "shortcuts", and those are clearly
> supported, so we should be able to use whatever mechanism that uses to
> support them as well. However, I'm probably well off beam here...

Actually "shortcuts" are very different from symlinks. For a start, the
Windows filesystem doesn't parse or understand them: they are only interpreted
by Explorer. They're also a lot more general than symlinks, since they also
contain command line args, urls, and so on. There's no good or close semantic
match between symlinks and shortcuts which means its a bad idea to treat them
as if there were.

J

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