Creating Symlinks?

[zerker]

Hey guys. I've been using muCommander a fair bit on Windows, OSX and Linux, and one thing I've been missing is the ability to create symbolic links. I find that some "default" folders don't exactly match how I might want to use them, so I just move them around and create a symlink from the original name. It works great, but I need to do this outside the wonderful muCommander (typically with Midnight Commander or just the ln command).

Can I request that you add this feature to muCommander at some point? I did a quick bit of looking around, and it looks like Java handling for symlinks is pretty easy (http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial ... links.html), so I don't think this is a significant technical problem. On Windows, if that library doesn't do anything equivalent, maybe you can either go with a reverse-engineering of the .lnk file format, or interface with the appropriate Windows libraries.

[Enzy]

More info about NTFS symlinks on windows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link

[zerker]

True. I was actually reading about that earlier today. I guess I wasn't clear though: I was most interested in creating Symlinks on OSX and Linux; the Windows comment was mainly about "what the command could also do in Windows". It may be worthwhile to have a .lnk implementation for Windows as a fall-back, since the Symbolic links are only supported on Vista and Windows 7 (and plenty of people still use XP).

[Nicolas]

Hey there,

Thanks for the link, I wasn't actually aware that NIOs could handle symlinks.
We'll definitely look into this and attempt to find a correct fallback solution for Windows. Can't promise when that'll be done, but I'm adding this to our TODO.

Thanks again for the feedback!

Nicolas

[maxence]

Hey everyone,
I just had a look at the link that was posted (thanks!), and while it is great to see that proper sym/hardlink support is coming our way, the tutorial refers to the java.nio.file package that will only be introduced in the upcoming Java 7. So this is not really an option for now, but there are other ways of creating links, using a command or native call.

This feature would be a welcome addition and probably not too hard to implement, at least partially. A ticket has been created by Nicolas, feel tree to throw ideas in it : http://trac.mucommander.com/ticket/275 .

Cheers,
Maxence