symlinks windows 7

[superplay]

I know the usefulness of symlinks however:

Can anyone give me an example of when you would use a hard link over a soft symbolic link and why are all links just not hard?

I know that a soft link is in effect a short-cut pointer to a folder/file and a hard link is a direct pointer so the OS thing that it is the real folder/file.

Cheers

 

[Deleted member 77746]

http://www.maxi-pedia.com/difference+between+symbolic+link+and+hard+link

 

[superplay]

Thanks for the link, very useful.

Anyone else who is from the Exchange world can look at "Hard Links" almost in the same vain as single instance storage (with a pinch of salt!). Whereby the actual file linked to is only deleted once all pointers / links are removed.

Where as with soft symbolic links the original file can be deleted and the symlink will still exist but when accessed it will not find the file as it has been deleted (As with shortcuts)

The article is well worth a read for anyone who is interested in this topic as each option provides different cross platform compatibility and what each one supports e.g files / directories etc..