February 12th, 2010

How do I get information about the target of a symbolic link?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Functions like GetFileAttributes and FindFirstFile, when asked to provide information about a symbolic link, returns information about the link itself and not the link destination. If you use the FindFirstFile function, you can tell that you have a symbolic link because the file attributes will have the FILE_ATTRIBUTES_REPARSE_POINT flag set, and the dwReserved0 member will contain the special value IO_REPARSE_TAG_SYMLINK. Okay, great, so now I know I have a symbolic link, but what if I want information about the link target? For example, I want to know the size of the link target, its last-modified time, and its name. To do this, you open the symbolic link. The I/O manager dereferences the symbolic link and gives you a handle to the link destination. You can then call functions like GetFileSize, GetFileInformationByHandleEx, or GetFinalPathNameByHandle to obtain information about the symbolic link target.

Exercise: If the field is called dwReserved0, shouldn’t it be off limits? Why isn’t the field called dwReparsePointType?

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
Code

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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