When those repos or packages are then restored elsewhere, the symlinks are also restored, ensuring disk space (and the user’s time) isn’t wasted. Many popular development tools like git and package managers like npm recognize and persist symlinks when creating repos or packages, respectively. The availability and use of symlinks is a big deal to modern developers: Now in Windows 10 Creators Update, a user (with admin rights) can first enable Developer Mode, and then any user on the machine can run the mklink command without elevating a command-line console. This latter restriction resulted in symlinks being infrequently used by most Windows developers, and caused many modern cross-platform development tools to work less efficiently and reliably on Windows. However, for Windows users, due to Windows Vista’s security requirements, users needed local admin rights and, importantly, had to run mklink in a command-line console elevated as administrator to create/modify symlinks. In UNIX-compatible operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, etc., symlinks can be created without restrictions. Replacing redundant copies of files can save a great deal of physical disk space, and significantly reduce the time taken to copy/backup/deploy/clone projects. BackgroundĪ symlink is essentially a pointer to a file or folder located elsewhere, consumes little space and is very fast to create (compared to copying a file and its contents).īecause of this, developers often replace duplicate copies of shared files/folders with symlinks referencing physical files/folders. This will allow developers, tools and projects, that previously struggled to work effectively on Windows due to symlink issues, to behave just as efficiently and reliably as they do on Linux or OSX. Starting with Windows 10 Insiders build 14972, symlinks can be created without needing to elevate the console as administrator. In our efforts to continually improve the Windows Developer experience we’re fixing this!
However, it hasn’t been easy for Windows developers to create symlinks. The Windows’ NTFS file system has supported symlinks since Windows Vista.
Symlinks, or symbolic links, are “virtual” files or folders which reference a physical file or folder located elsewhere, and are an important feature built in to many operating systems, including Linux and Windows.
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