Vista To Get Symlinks?

TheRealSlimShady writes "According to a post by Ward Ralston on the Windows server team's weblog, Vista server is to get symlinks as part of the SMB2 protocol." From the post: "In Vista/Longhorn server, the file system (NTFS) will start supporting a new filesystem object (examples of existing filesystem objects are files, folders etc.). This new object is a symbolic link. Think of a symbolic link as a pointer to another file system object (it can be a file, folder, shortcut or another symbolic link)."

Duplication...

[Erik_the_Awful]

...is a compliment of the highest form.

Re:Allow me to be the first to say...

[rolfwind]

I'm sure that's what those Plan9 folks are thinking of the Linux/BSD camp^_^

Funny thing is...

[WindBourne]

that in about 2 years time, everybody will be running around saying that MS developed it, and that *nix copied it. Just the way it works.

Re:NTFS already does it since Win2K !

[RoverDaddy]

Doesn't really matter if Win2K could do it if the feature was buried and the user had no way to use it. Also, Sys Internals seems to imply that only directories may be linked, not specific files. Not quite the same thing.
I've been wishing Windows would support this elemental feature for a long time now. I would have used it to create a directory tree with the structure I wanted to burn on CD, without having to move all the actual files around. The CD burning software I've tried doesn't understand shortcuts either. Of course you can usually create the tree you want within the burning app. But then, you have to save it in their proprietary format, and some programs I've used manage to trash that info too.

How sad

[photon317]

The Unix guys finally figure out how to move past symlinks to something better (private per-process inherited namespaces and bind() overlay mounts ala Plan 9 - coming to a Linux box near you soon), and now Windows starts implementing it for the first time (well .lnk links were kinda like half-baked symlinks, so they were halfway there before this announcement anyways).

..and about time, too!

[unfunk]

...now how about they get rid of this god-awful heirarchy thing they have happening here?
In Windows Explorer, the topmost level is the desktop, while in the CLI, there's as many 'topmost' levels as there are drives in the machine.
I never thought I'd say this, but I think they should adopt a *nix-like heirarchy, so that anything can be 'mounted' anywhere. Of course, they'd have to change the structure significantly, and have a built-in translator for "C:\things\stuff" type commands and whatnot.

But then, it'd probably be so hard to change all that, that they'd be better off doing an Apple OSX trick, and we all know how likely that would be...

Re:Ah yes

[MichaelSmith]

The basis of it is that a shortcut is just a file

When shortcuts were invented for Win95 the Win32 API should have been built to treat a shortcut as the object it pointed to. That way they would have had real working links up front. Now they are going to be stuck with two types of link which work in different ways.

Re:Symbolic links?

[m4dm4n]

I don't believe that the word innovate was used anywhere except here on slashdot. While it's been a long time coming, the blog entry that originally posted this admits that all these additions are addressing limitations in SMB.

It's not like Linux never copied an idea from another OS, yet it seems MS is not allowed to add a feature unless they thought of it themselves.

But then I guess everyone here gets a bit bitter when there is one less thing to complain about MS.

Re:Symbolic links?

[ben_rh]

It's actually closer to 40 years.. but yeah :)

Re:Symbolic links?

[ben_rh]

I think you're right to an extent, but the innovation comments are intended to be more general.

The density of the word 'innovation' in things MS say is directly proportional to how scared they are of the thing they're talking about.

Re:Symbolic links?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft are the ones always harping on about innovation, we like to take these opportunities to remind people that most things comming out of Redmond (other than the foul stench of bullshit) were copied or acquired. Microsoft couldn't innovate it's way out of a paper bag, they are a bad joke and have even coined their own punchline. Now that's what I call innovation!

Re:NTFS already does it since Win2K !

[astrosmash]

Rumors about real symbolic links in Windows have been swirling since before Win2000.

The problem with Junction.exe is that the Explorer shell and all other applications do not differentiate between links and real folders. That is, applications never expect two different paths to point to the same object, which makes Junctions much less useful in practice. For example, file search results take much longer to complete and display duplicate results. I believe that is why they initially limited Junctions to just directories.

Now, if Vista got persistent file handles, that would be interesting.

Re:NTFS already does it since Win2K !

[cuyler]

They aren't just mount points for volumes. You can mount a volume to multiple places with junctions. You can also use a junction to link C:\temp\directory to X:\anotherplace\asubdir\destination.

The pain (or feature) with junctions is the source directory doesn't have to be empty. As a System Administrator in the Managed Storage group this can be an incredible pain. If the destination points to another drive you don't want to include it in the backups since things will get backed up twice (since the os would see C:\temp\directory as on the C:\ drive and on the X:\ drive) so the best way to handle that is exclude it from the C:\ drive backup. The problem with junctions is if there were files in C:\temp\directory before you linked it to the directory on the X:\ drive you will see a bunch of files - some on C:\ and some on the mount point.

Re:Symbolic links?

[richie2000]

Seriously, what are they supposed to do?

Stop using the slogan "Freedom to innovate". Seriously. They have no right to use it -- they are against freedom and they do not innovate.

MS did it to themselves

[dustmite]

Microsoft brought this on themselves by running around calling themselves "innovative" pretty much several times per sentence during the anti-trust trial, and then continuing with an ongoing PR campaign that still today tries to paint them as being a truly "innovative" company. If you go call yourself innovative, and then proceed to produce a new "modern" operating system for 2006/7 whose primary advancements are all features that were commonplace in many other products anywhere from five up to nearly thirty years ago, you are asking to be lambasted, and you are going to be. You claim to be something that strongly, then you better be able to properly back up that claim or people will call you out on it.

It's kind of like what Google did to themselves with their "do no evil" 'motto'. By having such a motto, they've created a whole crowd of people (and a whole sub-genre of "journalism") which specifically look for evidence that they are 'evil'.

Re:We can only hope

[Florian Weimer]

Bullshit. Most unix software is not aware of symlinks because it doesn't have to be. Generally, only system utilities care about the existance of symlinks.

I wonder if this attitude leads to all those race conditions when creating files in /tmp, which can be exploited by planting symlinks at the right time.

Re:Already has this

[trezor]

and of course the plain old short cuts that are really symbolic links in the traditional unix world.

Try sharing that shortcut over Samba. Didn't work you say? Then, absolutely nothing UNIX-like about it.

The unfortunate part is people still think of DOS/Win95

I use Windows XP and it still has lots of shortcomings. However it's multimedia support is waay ahead of Linux, and I use my machine mainly for multimedia. So whatever criticism I may serve, that's based on WinXP and modern Redmond-OSes.

Give me a feature in Unix and Im sure there is an equivalent in NT.

• Kernel and network support loading before the GUI?
  You'd think any serious server-OS would implement this...
• Possible to recover the system without a GUI if needed?
  A reinstall with the textmode interface doesn't count.
• Modular kernel which can be stripped of unneccesary features?
  For whatever reason, increased security, lightweight editions, added native FS support...

Just to list a few. I do however have a job to do :-D

Re:Allow me to be the first to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets
people's attention.

Re:Symbolic links?

[aichpvee]

I think they originally meant that slogan to be a comparison to windows. You know, more along the lines of "Freedom to innovate OR use microsoft products."

Re:Allow me to be the first to say...

[mrogers]

That after all those years Microsoft still has drive letters with a dirty hack (my desktop / my computer /whatever) to 'unify' them, has only broken symlink functionality (shortcuts), and only now mentiones symlinks is quite pathetic, if you ask me.

Backward compatibility is absolutely indispensable for Microsoft - the only reason it's still the market leader after all the lawsuits, bad publicity and downright talented competition of the last few years is because nobody wants to break compatibility with their existing software, documents, networks and hardware. Microsoft understands this, and while I'm sure it drives a lot of MS developers insane, backward compatibility is always given top priority, even if it makes the architecture horribly ugly and illogical.

(If you want to see the Unix equivalent, read the chapter on terminal I/O in Stevens' Advanced Programming for the UNIX Environment. There are backward compatibility hacks in there that are so ugly you'll wish you'd been born blind.)

Re:Nevermind

[bcat24]

The whole point of symbolic links is that they're transparent. That way, an application doesn't have to parse a .lnk file. The OS handles reading/writing from the correct file. Real file symlinks have been missing from Windows for too long, I think it's about time they were added. (Whether or not anybody actually uses them instead of shortcuts is another story.)

Re:Different than shortcuts

[interiot]

Say you have a 1000-byte file called MyDocument1.doc.vistalnk on your desktop. It points to the real MyDocument1.doc somewhere else on your system.

If you open the file up in XP, Word will be very confused, and if anything, display the 1000-byte gibberish. In Vista, Word (and Outlook, and everything else) will automatically do the right thing, and read the contents of MyDocument1.doc without having to change any code in Word/Outlook/etc.

Since it's aan automatic part of the operating system, all previous and all future programs will support it. Whereas in XP, only a few small things like the executable launcher try to undrestand .lnk files.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Lol, symlinks

[Paul Jakma]

Then either he is confused, or it's a deliberate oversimplification. The former is impossible obviously ;), however the latter is a trap to the uninformed reader.

He never mentions hard-links at all, with which the namespace remains quite hierarchical and cycle-free. Symbolic links suck not because of the multiple-name thing, but because they're an implementation hack that both can turn the namespace into spaghetti and produce inconsistent results across applications due to how exposed their guts are to applications.

Plan9 has lots of interesting ideas here, obviously.

Re:Vista Will Probably Be BSD-Based

[LO0G]

Man, I LOVE /. posters.

So you have three reports on /. One of them describes a feature that's been in Windows since NT 3.1 (and exposed as a public API since Windows 2000) (symlinks). The other describes an existing feature that's been available for Windows since NT 4 and is now apparently being included in the OS base (SFU). And the third that describes a feature that's been available for Windows since NT 3.1 (and made really usable in XP) (limited rights user accounts).

From these three technologies, all of which are over 10 years old, the poster decides that Microsoft rewrote the Vista OS based on BSD.

I love this forum :)

Re:Symbolic links?

[robertjw]

Win2K's version of NTFS supports directory symbolic links, where a directory serves as a symbolic link to another directory on the computer.

How can it be considered a symbolic link if you can only link directories??

Unfortunately, Win2K comes with no tools for creating junctions

What good is a feature you can't use. That's just ridiculous.

Plus, 95%++ of the world's computers running Windows NT-based Operating Systems by now (e.g.-> NT/2000/XP/Server 2003)

Down from 99% 5 years ago

which run tons more hardwares than UNIX of any type does,

BS, very few pieces of PC hardware are completely unsupported by Linux. Plus, Linux has a much bigger foothold in the embedded market than Windows.

+ with more peripheral surrounding softwares for any imaginable purpose (thus, Win32 Os are far more ubiquitous + flexible)

'More peripheral surrounding software' is a very difficult statement to prove. There is more commercial windows software than Unix, but there are thousands, maybe millions of open source apps covering nearly ever imaginable purpose available and most of them are built for Linux.

Re:NTFS already had symlinks?

[Richard Steiner]

FAT filesystems have had hard links since the beginning, but CHKDSK doesn't like 'em... :-)

Ah, the "backwards comptibility" card...

[Richard Steiner]

Sorry, but that dog don't hunt this time. It's trivial to write a filesystem driver to create a virtual drive letter for legacy applications that would need such while at the same time making useful things available like true loing filenames, symbolic links, etc.

That's the same excuse that they used for using FAT32 in Win9x, but OS/2 proved them wrong even before the first Win9x release when OS/2 2.0 allowed DOS and Windows programs to install and run on an HPFS partition. Even Windows 3.1 itself could be installed under OS/2 on HPFS!

Besides, I think