Symbolic Links

Windows Vista includes symbolic links. Symbolic links act like shortcuts, but they provide a transparent link to the target file at the file-system level, rather than within Explorer. Therefore, although a user can double-click a shortcut from Explorer to open the original file, a symbolic link will actually trick applications into thinking they are directly accessing the target file.

As an administrator, you might need to use symbolic links for backward compatibility. For example, if an application expects to find a file in the root of the C drive, but you need to move the file to a different location on the local disk, you can create a symbolic link in the root of the C drive to the file’s new location, allowing the application ...

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