Relative links will mostly work, it is just that ./ and ../ links are suppressed. The idea is to avoid cycles which Windows will not recognize are happening. So for example, if I did

mlewin:/u/mlewin/html $ ln -s ../images images

will not work because there exists a possibility that in /u/mlewin/images I may have done

mlewin:/u/mlewin/images $ ln -s ../html html

which will create a nasty cycle as Windows recursively descends through

\filer\mlewin\html \filer\mlewin\html\images \filer\mlewin\html\images\html \filer\mlewin\html\images\html\images . . .

This occurs because UNIX directory links appear as directories to a CIFS client.

Basically, I personally do stuff like:

mlewin:/u/mlewin $ ln -s mlewincvs/internal_homepage web mlewin:/u/mlewin $ ln -s web html

so that people can get to .../~mlewin/ from our internal web site, and I can still get to my personally controlled web pages from CIFS without having to remember if I am supposed to go to "web" or "html"

Absolute links will only work if somebody has setup /etc/symlink.translations with some directive like

Map /u/path/dir/file /filer/dir/path

Unfortunately, that is as much as I know about the way that absolute links work. I will see what else I can find out.

On Tuesday, November 18, 1997 3:01 PM, Daniel Quinlan [SMTP:quinlan@transmeta.com] wrote:

Could someone explain exactly what works and what doesn't when using symbolic links from a CIFS client (Windows95 or WindowsNT, primarily) from a Netapp with Unix symbolic links?

Thanks.

• Dan