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.
- 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.
- Open “My Network Places” and drag the location to your Desktop.
- 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 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.
Aww I got all excited, it just made a boring shortcut. Maybe they got the instructions wrong?
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?
Tried this, if you use command prompt to go to C:\Documents and Settings\username\Desktop\share and dir, you see a target.lnk file. In explorer when you open the shortcut, you end up at \\server\share, so it looks like this just creates a shortcut link rather than a symbolic link.
I created the MS equivalent of a symbolic link to a network drive today by just dragging the folder (eg: t:\work\) over to my Start Menu button. Simple. After that I was able to copy the symbolic link from my Start Menu to my desktop and Quick Launch bar.
>> it just creates a folder that
>> references and act’s a normal shortcut.
Although at a low level it is a type of short cut, this certainly DOES NOT behave like a normal shortcut.
For example, after copying the link to my desktop I can now browse my network drive as if it were a sub-folder of my desktop - just as one would expect from a symbolic link. You can’t do that with a normal shortcut.
SUCKS. Not a Symlink - just a shortcut. Symlinks useful for their low-level attributes. That way they can be used for sharing common conf files, settings, media, etc.
The title of this post is a misleading and misinformed.