Visible symlinks under Windows

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Feb 22 12:23, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 09:20:18PM +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > On Feb 22 21:11, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > > On Feb 22 11:08, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 01:03:48PM +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > > > > 
> > > > > If that's considered too dangerous, what about utilizing the least
> > > > > significant bit in the ctime member?  Timestamps are defined in 100ns
> > > > > intervals.  The LSB could be set to 0 or 1 deliberately.  None of the
> > > > > Win32 timestamp related functions know about the ctime
> > > > 
> > > > No, don't think you can do that. Win32 apps will set a
> > > > time and expect to read it back exactly. We can't play
> > 
> > Oh, erm... are you sure?  The OS can't make any assumptions about the
> > timestamp granularity of the underlying file system, usually.  I don't
> > think that's comparable with DOS where the OS exactly knew how
> > timestamps are stored on the floppy down to every bit.
> 
> The problem is apps will set an exact timestamp, and
> then re-read it. They expect it to be identical. They
> don't resolve it, they just do a comparison.

Sigh.  Would tweaking the allocation size be an option, still?

The only other information left is the dos attribute and it seems that's
not useable.  Except, maybe, we could set the system attribute for
symlinks.  It shouldn't hurt much since Windows Explorer shows files
with system attribute like any other file.  It only hides files with
system and hidden attribute by default.


Corinna