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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT]: Important change to symbolic link functionali ty


On Thu, Feb 22, 2001 at 03:14:42PM -0500, Charles S. Wilson wrote:
> Here's the FAQ entry:
> 
> ---------------------------------
> My symlinks seem to point to different locations when accessed via
> Explorer/DOS or BASH.
> 
> Symlinks contain both a dos path and a cygwin path.  The cygwin path is
> interpreted using the current mount table every time the symlink is
> accessed from a cygwin program.  The dos path is determined from the
> cygwin path ONLY AT SYMLINK CREATION.  So, if you have changed your
> mount tables
> after creating the symlinks, it is possible that the internal dos path
> and the cygwin path are 'out of sync'.  To fix this, you can run the
> "fix-symlinks" program -- but be prepared for a long wait...it takes a
> while.
> 
>   fix-symlinks /

Nice :-)

> ---------------------------------
> I just thought of another problem though -- if I put together a distro
> tarball that contains symlinks, the dos paths will match MY system, and
> not the user's system.  Unless part of the postinstall script is to run
> fix-symlinks on the symlinks included in the installed package...

No. Obviously not. Since Cygwin tar reads and saves the POSIX path 
in the tarball, it is absolutely correctly recreated when unpacked
on the target system even when the links are absolute links, say
/usr/include/foo or alike.

Consider - it's _not_ the *.lnk file which is saved in the tarball
but the attribute to be a symlink. You would be right in case of
using WinZip when creating an archive. But that's unfair because it's
only a native Windows tool...

Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer                                mailto:cygwin@cygwin.com
Red Hat, Inc.

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