Strange symlink behaviour

Thu Mar 4 11:49:00 GMT 2010

> 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
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