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cygwin, Coda and symbolic links


Hello cygwin mailing list,

I'm a new subscriber looking to get some information relevant to the Coda File System development at Carnegie Mellon University, which uses cygwin as a platform to run on Windows 2000/WinXP. We rely heavily on symbolic links for a number of different features, most significantly representing conflicts within the file system. Conflicts are inconsistent file system objects which are represented as "dangling" or "broken" symlinks pointing to the file identifier of the inconsistent object, e.g., if "foo" fell into conflict:

[host]# ls -l foo
lr--r--r-- 1 root nfsnobody [date/time] foo -> @xxxxxxxx.yyyyyyyy.zzzzzzzz@realmname


Coda's current symlink support in cygwin is nonexistent, but we are looking to support symlinks in the same manner cygwin appears to -- as special Windows shortcuts that cygwin can interpret as symlinks. Allowing cygwin to see our conflicts as broken symlinks would be a big win for our repair mechanisms. We looked at the internals of a Windows .lnk shortcut file and (of course) part appears binary; we assume somewhere along the line that the cygwin developers reverse-engineered the contents of these files to hijack them for their own purposes.

First question, I've hunted for this information around the website, in the past mailing-list archives and the web, and it doesn't appear readily available. Is there anyone on the list who knows more about the internals of Windows shortcuts and could clue the Coda developers in? Also, how these shortcuts should be crafted to appear as symlinks to cygwin? We already know that they must be read-only files from Windows' perspective, and cygwin appears to use the "comment" field under Properties for its own addressing.

Secondly, is there a more appropriate mailing list for this question? (maybe the developers' list?)

Any information is appreciated, as well as a reply-all on any replies. Thanks!


Adam Wolbach


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