Real symlinks on a remote CIFS system are not recognized by Cygwin or Windows either. Rather, they are converted to real files by the underlying CIFS server so that "dumb" Windows clients don't get confused.
Ah, that makes sense and explains some behavior I was seeing.
Symlinks created with and for Cygwin are not real symlinks (with an exception). They are files with special properties so that they are recognized as symlinks by Cygwin.
Does that also apply to a symlink extracted from a tar file created on Linux?
Bottom line is, if you create symlinks via Cygwin, they will only be recognized by Cygwin clients. If you want symlinks which work on all systems (NFS->Linux, CIFS->Windows, CIFS->Cygwin), you have to create the symlinks using a Linux client.
That's what I was afraid of. My real issue is that this all works when I extract the tar ball into an empty directory, but it doesn't when the symlink already exists and a short cut is created instead. If the "rm //path/to/share/*" would simply delete the symlink I would not be having this problem. Wait, a thought just occurred to me. What if I delete the symlink first instead of deleting "*". I'll try this when I get to work today and report back with the results.
Vielen Dank, Alfred -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
