Accessing a cygwin symlink from windows

Question

I am quite new to cygwin. I created a symlink as follows

$ ln -s /var/www /cygdrive/d/foo

and when I check the D drive via windows, I see a system file called foo. Is there a way to make foo act as a folder for Windows instead of a system file?

Answer 1

Windows won't be able to read Cygwin-created symlinks, but you can create Windows symlinks using Windows commands, and Cygwin will treat those as symlinks.

On Vista and 7, this can be done with 'mklink'. This is a cmd.exe builtin rather than a standalone utility, so if you want to invoke it from a bash shell you have to do 'cmd /c mklink', and of course it will only understand Windows paths.

For XP, the 'Windows Resource Kit Tools' contain a utility called linkd that can be used to create directory links.