Symbolic Links

Windows Vista and Windows 7 include symbolic links. Symbolic links act like shortcuts, but they provide a transparent link to the target file at the file-system level rather than within Windows Explorer. Therefore, although a user can double-click a shortcut from Windows Explorer to open the original file, a symbolic link will actually trick applications into thinking they are directly accessing the target file.

As an administrator, you might need to use symbolic links for backward compatibility. For example, if an application expects to find a file in the root of the C drive but you need to move the file to a different location on the local disk, you can create a symbolic link in the root of the C drive to the file's new location, allowing the application to continue to access the file in the root of the C drive. Windows Vista and Windows 7 use symbolic links for backward compatibility with user profiles in earlier versions of Windows.

Symbolic Links, Hard Links, Junction Points, and Shortcuts

Windows Vista and Windows 7 support four different types of links, each providing a slightly different function:

• Shortcuts Shortcuts are files with a .lnk extension. If you double-click them within the Windows Explorer shell, Windows will open the target file. However, the file system treats .lnk files just like any other files. For example, opening a .lnk file from a command prompt does not open the target file.
• Hard links Hard links create a new directory entry for an existing file, so a single file can appear in multiple folders (or in a single folder using multiple filenames). Hard links must all be on a single volume.
• Junction points A lso known as soft links, junction points reference a folder using an absolute path. Windows automatically redirects requests for a junction point to the target folder. Junction points do not have to be on the same volume.
• Symbolic links A pointer to a file or folder. Like junction points, symbolic links are almost always transparent to users. (Occasionally, a program might use an outdated application programming interface [AP I] that does not respect a symbolic link.) Symbolic links use relative paths rather than absolute paths.