[quote comment=”9996″]linkd works on xp prof and not on xp. – mrunalini[/quote]

True. Although if you do have a copy of XP Pro you can easily just take linkd.exe and copy it to your XP Home machine and it will work.

linkd works on xp prof and not on xp. – mrunalini

Correction: Junctions are not hardlinks, they are symlinks (in the UNIX sense). Thus Windows incoherently supports hardlinks for regular files and symlinks for directories, but neither symlinks for files nor hardlinks for directories.

For the Windows equivalent of the UNIX /dev /mnt and /proc folders, NT has always supported full symlink functionality, plus device node hardlinks, however none of that directory structure is visible outside lowest level development and debugging tools such as objdir.exe .

P.S. File hardlinks are not new in Windows 2000, only the documentation and user interface.

I’m actually seriously thinking to make this a standard setup for company laptops:

1. create 2 partitions – one for OS, and one for Data
2. move the %userprofile% to the data partition
3. create junction to new location of %userprofile%

This way if Windows goes to shit, I can simply reinstall OS and recreate the junction as needed.

You can use it like symlinks on linux :D

I have a 5GB C:\ drive… but my C:\Documents and Settings\Fr3d folder is 2.98GB, and my Program Files is 4.78GB. How does this all fit on the same drive as windows, on a 5GB partition, where 2GB of that is free space :P

The answer? I mapped the Docs & Settings folder and the program files folder to another larger drive :)

And yes, it’s good for backups too as Luke mentioned – Some shitty application decided to erase my entire C:\Documents and Settings\Fr3d\ folder after I uninstalled it… So all I had to do was to use linkd again to re-map the folder – no files lost :D

There is no specific purpose – just the added flexibility. For example I sometimes like to create some sort of a link that would allow my clueless users to easily back up their Outlook.pst file. By default that file sits in C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsot\Outlook.

Please keep in mind that I had a user delete NTLDR once because it was cluttering his C: drive. I don’t want that guy to have to enable showing hidden files, and navigating through that path.

So I may just create a Email folder in My Documents which would be a junction to the actual Outlook data directory.

Or better yet – I could simply create a hard link to Outlook.pst in My Documents and call it Emails.pst. Then I could show him how to back it up every night by dragging it onto his thumb-drive, or CD-R icon.

And if he accidentally deletes, or overwrites the hard link, his email will still be working properly because the original file won’t be affected.

That’s just one windows-centric scenario of the top of my head. If you take a look at linux or other POSIX compliant systems, hard and soft links are used all over the place.

so what exactly is the purpose of these hard links?