{"id":24783,"date":"2007-10-15T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-15T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2007\/10\/15\/why-arent-shortcuts-as-easy-as-unix-links\/"},"modified":"2007-10-15T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-15T10:00:00","slug":"why-arent-shortcuts-as-easy-as-unix-links","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20071015-00\/?p=24783","title":{"rendered":"Why aren&#039;t shortcuts as easy as unix links?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Commenter dingo asks, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/pages\/407234.aspx#439796\">Why are shortcuts so hard to manipulate?<\/a> Why can&#8217;t they be as easy as unix links?&#8221;\n Well, if you want something like unix links, then you can just create a hard link. Creating them is about the same difficulty (<code>CreateHardLink<\/code> vs <code>link<\/code>) and manipulating them is the same since you don&#8217;t actually manipulate a hard link. You just use it like a regular file (since a regular file <i>is<\/i> a hard link).\n If you want something like unix symbolic links, then you can create an NTFS junction, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2004\/12\/27\/332704.aspx\"> such as this one that mounts a drive into a directory<\/a>. (I&#8217;m told that Windows Vista expands the repertoire of symbolic links as well.)<\/p>\n<p> But neither of these features is available on FAT (or CD-ROMs or Novell Netware or email), which meant that Windows&nbsp;95 couldn&#8217;t use them. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/technet\/technetmag\/issues\/2006\/09\/WindowsConfidential\/\"> Last year I discussed in some detail why shortcuts are files<\/a>. Maybe that&#8217;s what your question is really about. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Commenter dingo asks, &#8220;Why are shortcuts so hard to manipulate? Why can&#8217;t they be as easy as unix links?&#8221; Well, if you want something like unix links, then you can just create a hard link. Creating them is about the same difficulty (CreateHardLink vs link) and manipulating them is the same since you don&#8217;t actually [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-24783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-code"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Commenter dingo asks, &#8220;Why are shortcuts so hard to manipulate? Why can&#8217;t they be as easy as unix links?&#8221; Well, if you want something like unix links, then you can just create a hard link. Creating them is about the same difficulty (CreateHardLink vs link) and manipulating them is the same since you don&#8217;t actually [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}