Symbolic links in Windows XP

I was surprised to learn today that symbolic links are possible in Windows XP.  I’m not sure I’ll use them that often, but it will help me in replicating some linux build environment instructions.

Though not supported out of the box, you can download the tool that makes it happen at Microsoft’s sysinternals website.

I found it via this site.

Once you’ve downloaded it, add it to your path and then simply:

junction <linkname> <existing directory>

So if you had a folder c:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\tomcat and you wanted to reference it as c:\tomcat, you would run:

junction c:\tomcat c:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\tomcat

Windows 7 and Vista apparently support this via the ‘mklink’ command.

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One Comments Post a Comment
  1. Ben Kelly says:

    Thanks Jared.
    this is full of win. I’ve been looking for Windoze symlink options for a while. Found a few hacks, but not this. This looks perfect.

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About me

I'm Jared Quinert, a testing consultant located in Melbourne, Australia. With over fifteen years of experience, I specialise in agile testing, context-driven testing and intelligent toolsmithing with a focus on business outcomes over process. As one of the most experienced agile testers in Australia, I've been diving in hands-on since 2003 to discover how to build successful whole-team approaches to software development.

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