links in Windows

[tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org (Tom Metro)]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Does Windows actually have links?

Yes. More specifically, NTFS as shipped with NT 4.0 supports hard links, 
though it required third party commands to make use of them. At some 
point Microsoft provided a tool to create links in one of their 
"resource kits" - in either the W2K or Win XP time frame.


> Windows more recently adopted symbolic-like links.

The visible implementation of "symbolic links" are the .lnk files, but 
they foolishly implemented them at the shell level, and thus they only 
work if the application (like the shell) is aware of what to do with them.

NTFS as shipped with XP supports something called "reparse points" which 
can be used to create links to directories and as mounting points for 
file systems, but I don't think they are as general as symbolic links, 
which can point at anything.


> But, in Windows, does arg0 of an executable reflect the compiled name
> of the program, the actual name, or the symbolic link name if that
> was used to execute it.

I would expect it to reflect what was passed to the Windows API 
equivalent of execv(). Remember, Windows NT is POSIX compliant.

Thus hard links would work, but .lnk files wouldn't, as the shell parses 
them and resolves the reference before executing the program.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/