Microsoft has once again implemented more features from rival os’s, which can only be a good thing since in this case it’s Linux. Symbolic links, hard links and junctions can now be created in windows via the mklink command, older OS’s e.g. XP need to download the resource pack and grab linkd
USAGE
Mklink – vista/windows 7/ windows 2008 / windows 8
There are 3 options for mklink
- Symbolic links – selected via the /D flag - these are like short cuts - a symbolic link to a directory is created, the default is a file symbolic link . For those of us from Linux think softlink
- Hard link – selected via the /H flag – only for files – if you delete the hard link you delete the actual file as opposed to symbolic links where you just delete the link to the file
- Junction – selected via the /J flag – created a directory junction i.e. hard link to a directory
For example, if you want to create a symbolic link from your appv content directory e.g. c:\AppV\content to a dev directory e.g. c:\AppV\dev you would type:
mklink /D c:\Appv\content\dev c:\Appv\dev
as shown in the below image
Linkd - only on older machines such as XP, mklink is far better
LINKD Link [/D] Target
REMOTE ACCESS TO LINKS
I suggest using a junction, they work remotely by default, however if you need to access a symbolic link remotely you can by editing the symbolic link evaluation. MS explain this on technet here - the relevant part being:
Evaluations. A user can enable or disable any of the four evaluations that are available in symbolic links. The available evaluations are:
- Local-to-local describes a computer accessing a local symbolic link that points to a local file or folder.
- Local-to-remote is a computer accessing a local symbolic link that points to a Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path using the server message block (SMB) protocol.
- Remote-to-local is a computer accessing a remote symbolic link that points to a local file or folder using SMB.
- Remote-to-remote describes a computer accessing a remote symbolic link that points to a remote UNC path using SMB.
to allow all use the command :
fsutil behavior set SymlinkEvaluation L2L:1 R2R:1 L2R:1 R2L:1
e.g:
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