Hi all, I am experiencing problems with a UNC symbolic link and how it is interpreted by cygwin. The issue is as below:
* MachineA is a freebsd server (10.1-RELEASE-p9) with a simple samba3.6 [homes] share. * MachineB is a Windows 7 Ultimate, the user "bob" bsd home is not mapped to a network drive, instead a symbolic link is made under windows cmd: C:\Users\Bob> mklink /D bsdhome \\SOCRATES\bob This setup has been working for over 2 years without problems, I should mention also that Windows 7 sync center is used to keep bob's freebsd files available even when he is not connected to the server (not sure if this is relevant at all to the issue). Recently, I installed cygwinx64 (CYGWIN_NT-6.1), all went very well, the link "seem" to be recognized by cygwin. bob@machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob $ ls -l [----cut----] lrwxrwxrwx 1 bob None XX XX XX XX:XX bsdhome -> //MACHINEB/bob/ [----cut----] The problem I have is how to make cygwin somehow behave consistently with respect to this link. For instance, the bash builtin cd gives: bob@machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob/bsdhome $ cd .. bob@machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob $ However, bob@machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob $ touch file.txt bob@machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob/bsdhome $ cd bsdhome bob@machinea /cygdrive/c/Users/bob/bsdhome $ cp ../file.txt . cp: cannot stat ‘../file.txt’: No such file or directory Trying to do the same thing with windows/DOS cmd.exe works just fine. To make sure that windows created symbolic links behaved consistently, I created with the same process another symbolic link, but in this case to a directory and not to a network share, and proceeded to do the same copy. I couldn't reproduce the problem and the process was successful in cygwin. So as far as I came to fixing this problem, I found that cygwin somehow interprets ".." in the case of a network share symbolic link is actually pointing to //MACHINEB on the (//) virtual directory, which made no sense to me as far as symbolic links go and even if it did why would it work in the case of a normal directory...one too many slashes? :-) I understand the symptoms but I have no clue how to make this work or if this is a feature or a bug. Is this related to the virtual directory? can it be disabled? I did go through the documentation and googled the life out of me before posting here, the answer is probably too obvious and I can only blame my inexperience with cygwin. Perhaps someone has faced a similar situation, any help or hint would be much appreciated. /Socrates. -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
