That does make sense. I've played around with using ln -s to create my own symlinks. The odd thing is that these are all being created as shortcuts vs this other method. Now that I'm in the "I'm just curious" mode - Does anyone know why the two different methods are used?
-Mark -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gary R. Van Sickle Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2003 1:37 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Why do symlinks need to be system files > Mark R. wrote: > > Hello, > > > > I've been busy attempting to use WinInstaller LE to create an MSI > > package of cygwin so we can automatically deploy a customized build > > for our department. This works for the most part, however when I > > deploy this to a windows XP machine, all of the symlinks are broken. > > Ex/ vi doesn't work, however vim does. > > > > When I tracked down the problem, it appears that symlinks require > > the "system file" attribute to be set. Does anyone know why this is? > > Because that's part of how Cygwin recognizes them as symlinks. To expand on that a bit, it's so Cygwin doesn't have to open and parse the actual contents of every file it sees on a path to see if it's a symlink; it only has to check those marked as system. Since it's rare to find many files marked system normally, this results in mega-savings speedwise. Now if Microsoft would only get hip to this whole symlink thing.... -- Gary R. Van Sickle Brewer. Patriot. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
