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Windows XP Trick: Symbolic link to a network share

Did you know you can create a hard link (aka symbolic link) to a network share in Windows XP? This is undocumented as far as I can tell and was discovered by me on accident. Its very easy.

  1. Access the share as you would normally. Hopefully this causes it to show up in “My Network Places.” If it doesn’t, wait a while and try again, I’m not really sure what justifies a link in My Network Places anyway.
  2. Open “My Network Places” and drag the location to your Desktop.
  3. Done!

You now have a symbolic link (NOT a shortcut) which acts as an actual folder on your Desktop. Its almost like it was “mounted.” Go ahead and move it if you wish. The only way this works is when dragging out of My Network Places.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 1:33 am and is filed under Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Windows XP Trick: Symbolic link to a network share”

  1. andocromn Says:
    August 10th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

    this doesn’t create a symbolic link at all it just creates a folder that references and act’s a normal shortcut. This is quite apparent when you try to access the folder from a command prompt and all thats there is the actual shortcut. OP has no idea what he is talking about.

  2. Dragon Says:
    August 21st, 2008 at 5:39 pm

    Aww I got all excited, it just made a boring shortcut. Maybe they got the instructions wrong?

  3. sean Says:
    August 21st, 2008 at 7:58 pm

    I updated this post and worded it a little better for the googlers. I’ve been using this trick for years. Maybe you need WinXP Pro?

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