RE: Hardlinks/SymLinks in the vfat filesystem?

Riley Williams (rhw@BigFoot.Com)
Thu, 4 Feb 1999 21:35:11 +0000 (GMT)


Hi Jeremy.

>> 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.

Ah...my misunderstanding then - thanks for clearing that up...

Best wishes from Riley.

---
 * ftp://ftp.MemAlpha.cx/pub/rhw/Linux
 * http://www.MemAlpha.cx/~rhw/kernel.versions.html

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