I have been writing about the sweet little tool Junctions before but it got somehow lost among more popular articles back then and I decided to give it another try. A Directory Symbolic Link is a link from another drive or directory to an existing directory. NTFS Junctions could be used for instance to access the folder d:\mp3 from a symbolic link in c:\mp3.
Junction was created by Mark Russinovich and is freely available on the Microsoft homepage. The software has a size of only 41K and can only be used from the command line. I’m using several NTFS junctions to be able to access my most important directories from several of my hard drives.
Let us take a look at the example from above and create a NTFS junction from c:\mp3 to d:\mp3. To create the junction you open the command line and write the following code: junction c:\mp3 d\:mp3. If the folder c:\mp3 is not existing it will be created by the command line tool.
You do not have to name them the same way. You could as easily create another junction that links from f:\music to d:\mp3 as well.
This is in my opinion a very nice way of being able to access folders from different hard drives easily. To delete a junction you use the code: junction -d c:\mp3
You should note that you can’t use the root directory of a hard drive as the folder that you want to link to. You do need to specify at least one folder. It is also only possible to use junctions on ntfs hard drives.
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Why do it with the command prompt?
I think it’s better HardLink ShellExtension, you can use it for junctions, hardlinks, and symbolic links.
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html
Hi
If you’re looking to what’s claimed not to work in the last paragraph, you should look at the “Disk Management” utility. It can mount an entire filesystem to a drive letter, or to a mount point within another mounted drive. Note: this method only works for entire filesystems. If you want to link just a directory, then use the Junction stuff above.
On another note, why can’t one “Junction” a file? We’ve had this functionality as part of a standard build in Linux/*BSD for *years*.
Fredden you have to ask Microsoft the last question ;)
Someone posts a nice tool for windows and some people just have to bring in a linux reference.