Vista's Limited Symlinks 271
An anonymous reader writes, "Symlinks haven't really been added to Windows Vista. It seems that the calls to the Windows Vista symlink API only occur during the creation of such files or when accessing them from Windows Explorer. What this means is, you can't access symlinks from another OS. To be fair, you probably didn't expect to be able to dual-boot into XP and suddenly have access to the symlinks you created on the Vista partition earlier that day. But then again, you probably expected to be able to access these symlinks through a network share/UNC path or as files on a webserver. But you can't." From the article: "Clearly, Vista's symlink API isn't complete — hopefully this is something that can be patched via a hotfix and that we don't have to wait for Fiji to get something as simple as UNC support built in."
Broken Window syndrome (Score:2, Insightful)
Only on Slashdot... (Score:5, Funny)
Shorter titles are Sweeter (Score:5, Funny)
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obligatory quote (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:obligatory quote (Score:5, Funny)
And those who understand Unix wrote the Unix Hater's Handbook...
Re:obligatory quote (Score:4, Insightful)
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symlinks suck
per process namespaces rule
go glenda
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No, they're just Lisp users. They're like humans, only their brains are inside out.
Re:obligatory quote (Score:5, Funny)
Laugh.
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Obligatory rebuttal (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory rebuttal (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Obligatory rebuttal (Score:4, Funny)
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Isn't that the definition of Linux? Or was that, "Those who can not afford UNIX..."
(ducks and runs)
Neosmart's limited servers (Score:3, Funny)
You just have to buy the upgrade.. (Score:3, Insightful)
[and there's of course the not-invented-here syndrome - maybe symlinks are GPL-ed?
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Also you need to define "just works" -- you seem to mean feature set perfection, competing operating systems don't have that either, either in features or lack of bugs.
"Links" are not necessarily a fs feature (Score:2)
MacOS has had aliases [wikipedia.org] since System 7 and they're far more useful than a unix-style symlink ever has been for me -- in part because everything that needs to open a file on the Mac uses the MacOS APIs. POSIX is "closer to the metal" and therefore pays a price in lost features of abstraction.
If you want Unix-style utilities to work with the new Vis
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It's the job of the OS makers to provide a POSIX implementation that works on top on the native api. You'll find that developers writing cross-platform apps are not fond of having to conditionally use platform specific code, especially in situations like file io that has been standardized for ages.
Apparently... (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, sure. (Score:5, Funny)
Same ol' show (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think they get it (Score:5, Insightful)
I expect that whatever hodge-podge of new features, one-off Resource Kit utilities or whatever else Microsoft decides to offer in their latest and greatest, I'll continue to rely on the folks at Cygwin to take advantage of whatever limited functionality exists in Windows, and then implement workarounds for the inconsistencies and shortcomings to make something useful and sane with it. In the meantime, I'll bet my right monad that a future Slashdot headline will read Vista's Borked NFS Client.
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--S
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Vista Symlinks not accessible via in XP and 2000 (Score:3, Insightful)
People are asking questions about VISTA Symlinking on MSDN. See this thread. [microsoft.com] The Vista symlink seems to have not much more functionality than "shortcuts" did in Windows 95 or Windows 98.
The issue at hand is why was the API left so incomplete that remote accessing a share that utilizes Vista Symlinking does not work? This is a large oversight on Microsofts part, and basically makes Symlinking useless. Fortunately, Symlinking works great via Samba. Another reason to stick with Linux..
Yahma
ProxyStorm [proxystorm.com] - An Apache based anonymous proxy service for security minded people.
22.. (Score:3, Insightful)
22 bloody years...
<nelson>haha!</nelson>
Junctions (Score:5, Informative)
Whoa, big mistake. Junctions *do* work, but, and I think this is why Microsoft didn't promote or encourage their use, none of their other tools support them. In other words, doing a search of a drive that has junctions can lead to infinite recursion depending on how the junction is created. No Windows tools understand the "Don't follow symlinks" command that Unix tools have, and I had a few programs even crash whenever I tried to save to a junctioned-folder (Visual Studio was guaranteed to crash on me).
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Very clever!
Even more so because there is no warning about this, or any way to see (in the explorer) that this is going to happen. E.g. because of a different icon or color used for a junction, like for a hidden file or a compressed file.
This stupid explorer is warning me that I want to delete a read-only file (as if anyone cared), but it smoothly deletes data it should not touc
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This is what you expect from Unix experience! The only thing that can be different between two hardlinked files is the name. All the attributes are shared.
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I use the junction tool too (so I can support 2 versions of my app), VS2005 works perfectly well with it, but I keep everything local, and as simple as possible. I've never had a problem with junctions.
If this is the worst ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't worry, it isn't. (Score:3, Insightful)
There's plenty of other worse things about Vista; this is just an amusing side note.
Don't underestimate Vista (Score:3, Funny)
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Hey, does nobody else see the parent as a +5 funny? Even better if you have mod points...
Re:Don't underestimate Vista (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but much of the continual bashing of Vista comes from the fact that we're continually discovering new flaws. It's hard to stop bitching when you're subjected to a continuous stream of news saying that "Vista feature X was dropped/doesn't work as advertised/is implemented in a bad fashion".
If you can't be better, be faithful (Score:4, Interesting)
It also has Mac OS "aliases," introduced IIRC in System 7, which most Mac devotees think are superior to UNIX symlinks.
Now, before I get too far into praising "aliases," let me acknowledge that the presence of both mechanisms in Mac OS X is a big, hairy, ugly, mess, and one of innumerable places where the Mac world currently suffers from having anywhere up to half a dozen or so APIs for the same basic functionality. Mac OS X now resembles, well, my house, with fifteen-year-old half-abandoned dusty possessions still lurking in the attic. Not that Windows is any better, of course.
But I digress. You may like Mac OS aliases or you may dislike them, but you can see they they are a complete, well-thought-out, finished, working mechanism that it is at least possible to admire as something more than a half-baked knockoff of symlinks.
I happen to like them, a lot, because they just work. You don't need to do anything special at a programming level to dereference them, and it doesn't matter what programming language you're using or whether you're accessing them across the network, or whatever. However you do it, when you open the alias, you open the file it points to. And they are not fragile: you can move them or rename them or whatever and they still point to the right place. (The tough part is not dereferencing them... and Apple's deliberate failure to document or provide an API for creating them programmatically).
What I find hard to forgive Microsoft is that when Microsoft implements their knockoff of a well-known OS feature, it is rare that they come up with anything fresh and original. So many of their derivatives seem to be hasty knockoffs implemented by people who didn't "get" the original. And they put these half-baked implementations into shipping products, making it very difficult for Microsoft ever to finish them or fix them.
You can see this in a dozen places, like the Windows NT command language, which is a half-baked extension of the miserable quarter-baked DOS command language. Jeez, guys, you had DCL and the various UNIX shells as models, couldn't you do better than that?
And five years later, there tends to be conflicting documentation: the documentation written when badly-designed feature X was introduced, telling all good little Microsoft developers that they simply must, must, must use feature X in everything, and the documentation written a few years later warning everyone against the bad practice of using crufty old deprecated feature X...
I just wish I could shake Microsoft by the scruff of the neck and say, "Listen, if you can't improve it, then at least make a faithful copy of it."
Don't just pee in it to give it that personal flavor.
Clarification about Mac alias robustness (Score:2)
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Not to be an ass, but even freaking Shortcuts in Windows (from Win2k and newer) don't break either, even if the shortcut points to a volume half way around the globe.
Look up NTFS's DLT features...
As for the whole Vista not supporting Symlinks, people really need to do a bit of homework here. Vista supports, three main types of reference mechanisms from Symlinks to the old Shortcuts. What people are talking abou
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Not quite. OS X actually has three kind of link:
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Currently they are a bit screwed up. They have three types of links (hard, symbolic, and aliases). And aliases, though they might be nice, have an API even worse than what Microsoft is coughing up. At least on Windows I can peek into a "desktop link" file and read the symbolic link. There d
No Compelling Reason to Buy Vista (Score:2)
Re:Shortcuts are nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
http://win32.mvps.org/ntfs/lnw.html [mvps.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link [wikipedia.org]
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=3
NTFS does support links, but as usual from Microsoft, it's half-baked and only the bare minimum required for POSIX compliance was implemented. From sysinternals (now a Microsoft site) you can download a utility for manipulating NTFS links, or you can install the free Services for Unix (again, from Microsoft's web site) to get the M$ version of ln.
don't use NTFS (Score:5, Informative)
Try this [fs-driver.org] and a ext3 file system. I have all my Documents and the whole user directory on an ext3 and it works great. I can also access it from Linux if I want...
Re:don't use NTFS (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it possible to run all of Windows on EXT3?
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The on-disk and network permissions are closely related, I think.
If they would have kept their original ideas (Score:2, Informative)
Re:If they would have kept their original ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
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My bet: Engineering came up with great ideas and those were communicated early in development. Then the Marketing and Lock-in departments cut the features left and right. For example because the ability to easily swap kernel or file system does benefit the customers and makes it harder to enslave them.
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Re:If they would have kept their original ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when Microsoft announced that they were moving graphics back to ring 0 with NT 4.0. The rationale was that they would get much improved performance, which is a perfectly fair conclusion. But when asked about the liability created by this, they basically said, 'Well, if your graphics driver is hosed, you can't use the system anyway, so you'd just as well reboot.'
That wasn't the last straw for me, but it demonstrated with perfect clarity that this was not the OS I wanted on my servers. Here was Microsoft telling me with a straight face that they had no plans to ever provide any decent remote control of the server, that multi-user scenarios were off the table for the foreseeable future, and that system performance was going to be compromised in order to draw windows more quickly, rather than optimised over time in userland.
It was clearly a fundamental technical design decision made by the marketing department, who apparently would be happy to put tits on a bull if it increased market share in the hermaphroditic bestiality demographic.
Within two years of that, I was working exclusively with FOSS on my servers, and have never looked back.
There's a lot of mindless partisanship on Slashdot, but I think it's useful to remember from time to time that many posters here have learned to dislike Microsoft the hard way: through bitter experience of watching marketing continually triumph over technology.
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Of course this was just for marketing purposes: once the customer was baited into Microsoft lock-in they would discover that this compatibility stuff was all half-backed and buggy, and would switch to using the Windows API in
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I doubt that NT or any other windows would have much trouble on ext2/3, but microsoft are not exactly likely to allow it.
Re:don't use NTFS (Score:5, Insightful)
Good that it does, but you shouldn't advertise it as being true ext3 since it isn't. The ext2 ifs windows thing doesn't support ext3 journaling, it just treats the ext3 volumes as if they were ext2.
Point me to a true xfs windows driver and I'll be happy.
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Re:don't use NTFS (Score:4, Informative)
The only thing I would be worried is corruption not speed. I have never had problems, but I would not put a financial database on it either, just because it is somewhat new and "experimental"...
Re:Shortcuts are nothing new (Score:4, Insightful)
The article is about how it doesn't.
see his home page/blog (Score:2)
"I am a software developer in Seattle, building a new AI software company. I used to work at Microsoft on Excel"
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http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2006/10
4 lines directly under +ABOUT
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A shortcut is analagous to a KDE
Try again.
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That so called "shortcut" feature that has been around since Windows 3.1 isn't a 'link [wikipedia.org]' as it works on POSIX complaint systems. It is a shortcut that gives the user - not the computer - a quick way to access a directory. It cannot handle I/O functions.
Re:Shortcuts are nothing new (Score:4, Informative)
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There are "semi hard" links that Mac OS (but not OS/X?) do that may be better than both symbolic and hard links. They act like hard links as long as the linked-to file exists. If it is deleted they then act like a soft link (not sure if they
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The license covered Unix code as well as far as I can tell, most of which is in the public domain, and the remaining bits owned mainly by Novell and other parties.
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I'm slightly confused - hard links have been in NTFS for years, and I've use them a few times for various tasks, so why is NT so bad in relation to others? I'm also not sure why shortcuts are different to symlinks. Don't both just store a pathname to link to? If the target changes, the symlink/shortcut still points to that named file, or if the target no longer exists, both shortcuts and symlinks no longer work? Or am I misunderstanding? Your analogy doesn't seem to work - the key difference as far as I
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Is there a difference between them this week? I haven't been keeping up.
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Why this obsession with UNIX?
There are plenty of other OS's they could base thier OS off, maybe even VMS.
Unix is far from perfect, I want choice but when Linux fanboys here choice they think it must be a choice which distribution you use, because Linux is the only choice.
Back to the line about VMS, because NT was built by a bunch of ex-DEC guys, the NT Kernel isn't that bad.
I mean, they could always port GNU userland over to the NT
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Back when I worked in VMS I got invited along to the local DEC HQ and recieved a lecture from some MSFT guy on how much NT is like VMS and that we should all run NT on alphas.
He asked for questions and I ask him why NT doesn't have proper vms-esque device names (dka0, etc). The question didn't go down very well. I supose that would break too much stuff.
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As the GP suggests, the Services for Unix package contains a lot of GPLed stuff, the code for which is also available on the Microsoft FTP servers. Microsoft have no issues with actually following license terms if they are required to do so.
The problem is replication (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that was more an example of something they could have done - basically a good choice, even though there are others.
The main problem I see with Microsoft is the incredible degree to which they duplicate something that already exists:
* Operating system, as noted they could base this on UNIX or something else and saved a lot of effort.
* Filesystem - why does the world need NTFS? There are other really good file systems around. If it offered features like ZFS I could see it but about the only FS I'd like to use less than NTFS is FAT, and that's actually a better choice for small devices because it's simpler!
* Display format - PDF ain't good enough for Microsoft, hell no, we need a brand new document/display language. Metro!
* Porgramming langauges. We can't extend Java just the way we like without community review? Screw you all, we're building a new ball from scratch and running home!
* I think we need an XML based document format. It's not like one already exists or anything, let's create one from scratch!
Think of how far the industry as a whole would be along if Microsoft actually contributed to any of those fields instead of devoting huge numbers of resources to creating anew. Microsoft single handedly has set the computer field back probably a decade or more.
Re:The problem is replication (Score:4, Insightful)
I watched a PBS show the other day where Bill Gates was taking questions from college students. One of the questions was "Who do you look up to for advice?" and he said "Nobody!" and that basically he is rich and smart enough that he _always_ just came with future directions for his company (MS) completely on his own. He talked how sometimes it failed (remember WebTV included in Windows 98?), and I thought to myself how that mentality of "we don't look at others, we are the smartest, biggest and we'll re-invent everything" has probably hurt MS just as much as it helped. Not many operating system concepts have come out of Microsoft as being better than what was already out there. There was always a better kernel, a better file system, a better network stack, a better security model, a better system API and so on. (By "better" I mean better implemented practically, sure NT has a great security model but practically it is not the best, and "theoretically" Windows XP would support POSIX...but in reality it doesn't)
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I mean, they could always port GNU userland over to the NT kernel, but dont MS already do that (or someth
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You don't really need to use them. In Windows you can perfectly access the volume where you installed it by simply using "\". You can also mount a volume to a folder, Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Computer Management > Disk Management > Right Click a Volume > Change Drive Letter and Paths > Add > Mount in "\blahblah" (make sure you first create the folder) > OK, and then you can just access that volume without using drive letters by doing "\bla
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Re:Windows' FS / the alternate universe story (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft needs a new NT (Score:2)
I mean, how often did they have to scrap major parts (or even everything) of Vista and start over? At least twice, I think. Windows is getting unmanageable and I somewhat doubt that the NT kernel is in a better state. If Microsoft first developed a structur
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They do [microsoft.com]
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Re:Holy negativity Batman! (Score:5, Funny)
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It's their OS, they know all the dirty little secrets of their code and they can make it happen if they want to. Rather, I suspect it doesn't suit them to have a completed api at present.. in fact I'll even hazard a guess that (unsurprisingly) their motivations in this matter will be less to do with product quality
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Having worked for fortune 500 companies, I would say that you are giving them more credit for wisdom than is usually the case.
The environments I have see they usually:
1) Have a host of managers who have a poor grasp of what they are managing
2) Tend to go with the lowest bidder when contracting out for services, e.g. o
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Sorry, but that use to be the kind of patting on the back you give to children who come last in a competition.
Re:Huh? Symlinks were in XP/2000 NTFS all the time (Score:5, Informative)
At first blush you would think so, but the semantics of a windows NTFS symlink is more like a mount point.
Firstly, you can't use normal "commands" to create/delete NTFS symlinks. The collection of system calls to create a symlink are badly documented and incomplete.
The big differences are (from memory):
So while there is a similar function called a "reparse point" it is more like "mount" that it is like a a true UNIX symlink.
Also, most of the Windows tools just don't deal with link (hardlinks or symlinks). If you do a hardlink from one file to another and check to see disk usage of a directory, the file is counted twice. Most unix tools (du etc) will not count hardlinked files twice and symlinks are counted as the disk space the symlink uses not the file it points to.
Symlinks are a very powerful tool and are very mature in the *nix world. Windows is just simply way behind on this one.
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So this means that Windows still isn't ready for the desktop? Perhaps the next version after Vista then...
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In that case, proper Windows software (including game) compatibility is more important.