Symbolic Links in Windows

Posted by Anuj Seth

October 7, 2008

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All those who have worked on *nix systems, are familiar with the concept of symbolic links created with the “ln” command. It makes it so much easier to manage directories and files with such symbolic links.

Surprisingly, many people believe that this is not possible to replicate on Windows.

If you are using Windows 2000 or higher (XP, Vista, etc.) and use the NTFS file system, you can actually create symbolic links using a tool called Junction. The only catch being that this tool supports directories only. You cannot create symbolic links for files.

Junction was created as part of the SysInternals project which was acquired by Microsoft in 2006.

Why should I use this?

Let me give you a good example of how I use this. I do a lot of hobby projects using PHP and this requires the Apache Web Server. All the web pages are stored under a directory called “htdocs”. If I have 2 projects, how do I manage this?

I simply create two directories called “htdocs-project1″, and “htdocs-projects2″. I then point htdocs using Junction to the appropriate directory depending on which project I am working on currently.

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