On Tue, 10 Feb 2015, Andrew Lunn wrote: > On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 03:43:32PM -0600, Mike Miller wrote: >> I have an NTFS external USB drive that I sometimes attach to an >> (old) Windows XP box that has Cygwin installed, and other times I >> attach it to an Ubuntu box. I made a bunch of symlinks in Cygwin on >> XP but when I look at them on Ubuntu they are just small regular >> files. >> >> So my first question is basically this: What are you guys doing to >> deal with this kind of issue? It would be best if I could make >> symlinks that just worked in Linux and Windows. Can that be done? > > See > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link That does say a few things of value but it doesn't mention Cygwin or Linux. I did look it up before I wrote here -- the problem is that there are too many answers out there and they are all over the map. It's hard to decide what actually works. Questions: If I make a symlink on the NTFS drive using Linux, will that symlink work when I attach the NTFS drive to a Windows 7 machine? Do any of you know the answer? One thing for sure: In XP it does not work. The "filter drivers" recommended for XP in the Wikipedia article did not seem to work. I could neither make symlinks nor read them using that software. Maybe I did something wrong with the installation, but there wasn't a lot to do and it seemed to install. It did make hard links, but Cygwin didn't seem to handle them properly because when I deleted the hard link, it also deleted the original file. If Linux symlinks work in Windows 7 (and later), then I'll be fine. I don't need for them to work in XP. Maybe a symlink is a symlink is a symlink and XP is just doing it wrong (it makes .lnk files instead). Mike