Re: vfat patch for shortcut display as symlinks for 2.4.18

Kurt Wall
2002-06-13T02:57:29Z

Also sprach Ryan Cumming:
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> On June 12, 2002 19:25, Kurt Wall wrote:
> > That's *precisely* the point I tried to make. .desktop files are
> > just plain text files, as far as Unix is concerned. They do not map
> > neatly to Windows .lnk files because the kernel's file system layer
> > does not handle them specially, as it does symlinks. God and Bill
> > Gates alone know how Windows handles .lnk files, but it does seem
> > that Windows imputes to them special semantics, rather like a shell
> > script.
>
> No, some people actually know how Windows works. The kernel has very
> little to do with .lnk files, and in fact it sees them as regular
> files. If you run "notepad foo.lnk", you will see the link's binary
> contents. If you use the CreateFile or OpenFile kernel calls, you will
> get a file handle pointing to the link's contents. If you attempt to
> execute a .lnk file from the command line or using CreateProcess, it
> will horribly fail.
>
> In fact, to dereference a link in userspace, you must open the .lnk
> file, examine its contents with a library call, and then open the
> destination file. This is extremely similar to how Gnome or KDE
> handle .desktop files: mainly in the shell.

Okay. I readily admit that I do not know how Windows works.
I stand corrected.

Kurt
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