[Tutor] symlinking dirs with spaces

[Dave Angel]

On 04/27/2013 09:38 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On 28/04/13 04:53, fomcl at yahoo.com wrote:
>
>> IIRC, os.symlink is not present in Python on Windows, right? (I'm on
>> vacation now so I can't check this). But aren't soft links and
>> shortcuts linux and windows terms for the same thing?
>
> No, although they play similar roles.
>
> Windows shortcuts are ordinary files with a .lnk extension. The content
> of the file points to another file on disk. Windows opens the file,
> looks inside to find out what target to look for, then looks for the
> target. That makes them somewhat like Mac OS aliases, only not as smart.
> (Mac aliases can actually keep tracking a file if you move it from
> location to location, even from disk to disk.)
>
> Symbolic (soft links) links are file system features, which means that
> strictly speaking they depend on the file system, not the operating
> system. Unlike shortcuts or aliases, which are files, sym links exist in
> the file system metadata, which makes them smaller, faster to access,
> and more efficient.
>
> Hard links are also file system features. Essentially, a hard link is a
> way to give a single file two names. If you think of the file system as
> a tree of file names pointing to storage locations on disk, hard links
> are two names pointing to a single location.
>
> A little known fact: NTFS does support symbolic links, at least under
> Windows 7 and Vista. NTFS sym links have some limitations compared to
> POSIX (Unix, Mac, Linux, etc.) sym links, the biggest being that they
> don't work during boot-up.
>
>
>

And another little-known fact -- NTFS supports hard links, or at least 
it did in 1995, on NT 3.5  As I recall, there wasn't support at the cmd 
prompt, but you could create them with system calls.


-- 
DaveA