If you don’t know what that does, then brace yourself. It is a symbolic link, a tool that we have had in Linux and Unix for some time but that is sadly lacking in Windows. The Windows Vista blog is reporting, though, that the next version of Windows will come with symbolic link support.
Windows, in their usual sub-par way, implemented a similar feature that most people understand as the shortcut. However, shortcuts are a very poor implementation and lack transiency across the operating system. Ward Ralston is te brains behind this and describes the difference between a symbolic link and a shortcut in this way:
So then you ask how is that different from a short-cut (the .lnk file)? Well, a shortcut will only work when used from within the Windows shell, it is a construct of the shell, and other apps don�t understand short-cuts. To other apps, short-cuts look just like a file. With symbolic links, this concept is taken and is implemented within the file system. Apps when they open a symbolic link will now open the target by default (i.e. what the link points to), unless they explicitly ask for the symbolic link itself to be opened. Note symbolic links are an NTFS feature.
Good idea, guys. I’d like to see a couple other features brought in from Unix:
- Built in compatibility with tarball archives and gzip compression - *.tar.gz files
- Built in Win32 C compiler, a la GCC
- Built in SSH, and SSH passphrase support
- Ext3 partition read/write support
I’m not holding my breath but it sure would enhance interoperability.
