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.