Alan B. Pearce wrote:

> But from distant memories of doing the M$ courses for WinNT many years ago, 
> there is a facility to do *nix style directory links on NTFS, but it seems 
> to be considered "too hard" to get used. 

As I just wrote in another post, it seems that Windows shortcuts actually
work pretty transparently as symbolic links even for non-executable files.
Not sure what's the problem is really with them; my short investigation
didn't bring up any. Possibly standard C library file functions don't
handle them; but probably there's a Windows API that does.

The "too hard" thing you are referring to could be NTFS hard links. They
are not really "hard" to get used, but they only work within one NTFS
volume. Maybe the "too hard" part is that there's no GUI for them that
comes with Windows :)  http://tinyurl.com/yly8ju

> Another way seems to be to map drive letters to local share points, but I
> haven't tried that.

You can do that, or you can use subst. subst has the advantage that it is
not considered a network connection, while drive letters mapped to local
sharepoints are considered (by the system) a network connection. OTOH, if
you make such a mapping persistent, it will start earlier in the boot
process than a subst in the startup files and be available when WinXP opens
Explorer windows that were open on shutdown. subst mappings typically are
only available later on, so Explorer windows that were open on subst'ed
directories on shutdown will show an error on startup.

However, this all works only for directories, not files. I use the subst
method regularly.

Gerhard

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