Surprisingly, all the good Windows features are hidden, undocumented and hard to find. It took me nearly a decade to accidentally find out that Windows has symbolic links. They are called NTFS Junction Points. However their support is limited to directory links, and the usage is a bit weird.
Oh, and you have to install Windows Resource Kit to get the functionality. You can download it from any of these locations:
- http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9D467A69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD&displaylang=en
- http://www.petri.co.il/download_windows_xp_reskit_tools.htm
The command you want is linkd. Let's take it for a spin.
The sandbox contains a directory named
original with text.txt inside.To create a symbolic link named
symlinked that points to original, the command is linkd symlinked original. In POSIX it would be ln -s original symlinked.
When calling
dir, symlinked shows as "junction". The other behavior is like a plain folder. In explorer you cannot tell the difference between the two.
To delete the symlink use
rmdir, because del will attempt to remove the files from original directory.
