At 09:50 AM 4/30/2002, Mellman Thomas wrote: >I know this has been discussed quite a bit from various angles, but >after hours of searching through the mail archive, I can't seem to >find the angle that's important to me. > >I can create fine shortcuts with ln -s which are accessible by Windows, >but I can't seem to be able to use Windows Shortcuts with Cygwin. > >I might have resignedly accepted this as a consequence of having a >great interface on a crummy os, except that I *could* follow Window's >shortcuts before I just upgraded to 1.3.10. > >For example, there are all kinds of shortcuts scattered around my filesystem >which have been installed by my company's tools which I used to be able to >call from bash and put in the background. Then I could Alt-tab to that window >and use the keyboard. Or, do an ls -l on them and see where they point to. >Since 1.3.10, that doesn't work anymore: now I've always got to go reaching for the >mouse. > >An interesting side effect: I have a shortcut (Desktop.lnk) on my $HOME >that was originally created by Windows. I can't cd there anymore. I tried >to create a second link for Cygwin (Desktop), but ln tells me it already >exists! > >$ ln -s $nt/Desktop Desktop >/bin/ln: creating symbolic link `Desktop' to >`/cygdrive/c/WINNT/Profiles/mt099378/Desktop': File exists > >Thus, even though Desktop.lnk isn't recognized as anything special, it >is anyway!
Just because it isn't recognized as a Cygwin symbolic link doesn't mean it doesn't exist as a file as far as Cygwin is concerned. I guess you missed the discussion in the email archives (was it at cygwin-developers?) about the problems of following shortcuts made by Windows as symbolic links. I won't review them here but suffice it to say that treating Windows created shortcuts as symbolic links is a whole lot of trouble. Initial implementation of Cygwin symlinks as shortcuts ignored this issue (because it wasn't known to be a problem). The current implementation only follows Cygwin-created (via ln -s) shortcuts as a result. You probably had a previous version of Cygwin which implemented shortcuts as symlinks before these problems were noticed. Sorry but this is the new state of things. Larry Hall [EMAIL PROTECTED] RFK Partners, Inc. http://www.rfk.com 838 Washington Street (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office Holliston, MA 01746 (508) 893-9889 - FAX -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
