This is the mail archive of the
cygwin@cygwin.com
mailing list for the Cygwin project.
RE: Why do symlinks need to be system files
- From: "Mark R." <mcr2z at cs dot virginia dot edu>
- To: "'Gary R. Van Sickle'" <g dot r dot vansickle at worldnet dot att dot net>, <cygwin at cygwin dot com>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 08:42:41 -0400
- Subject: RE: Why do symlinks need to be system files
That does make sense. I've played around with using ln -s to create my own
symlinks. The odd thing is that these are all being created as shortcuts vs
this other method. Now that I'm in the "I'm just curious" mode - Does anyone
know why the two different methods are used?
-Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com [mailto:cygwin-owner@cygwin.com] On Behalf Of
Gary R. Van Sickle
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2003 1:37 AM
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: RE: Why do symlinks need to be system files
> Mark R. wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I've been busy attempting to use WinInstaller LE to create an MSI
> > package of cygwin so we can automatically deploy a customized build
> > for our department. This works for the most part, however when I
> > deploy this to a windows XP machine, all of the symlinks are broken.
> > Ex/ vi doesn't work, however vim does.
> >
> > When I tracked down the problem, it appears that symlinks require
> > the "system file" attribute to be set. Does anyone know why this is?
>
> Because that's part of how Cygwin recognizes them as symlinks.
To expand on that a bit, it's so Cygwin doesn't have to open and parse the
actual contents of every file it sees on a path to see if it's a symlink; it
only has to check those marked as system. Since it's rare to find many
files marked system normally, this results in mega-savings speedwise.
Now if Microsoft would only get hip to this whole symlink thing....
--
Gary R. Van Sickle
Brewer. Patriot.
--
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/