It’s not often that something we classify as a “really good” feature turns out to be a bit of a sham, but unfortunately, that’s the case with Vista’s symlinks. Just a couple of days ago, symlinks were our “big Vista feature of the week,” but now, we’re not so sure.

First, a correction. Symlinks haven’t really been added to Windows Vista. Sure, you can use the mklink command to get Vista to intercept calls made to certain paths and have them silently and invisibly replaced with whatever real paths you previously specified, just like Symlinks are supposed to be – but that’s about it. Vista’s symlinks aren’t much better than junctions in 2k/XP that don’t take up extra hard drive space, and indeed are quite a bit less compatible.

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OK, we take our last post back, Vista does have several exciting features to blog home about (and guys, for the last time, that comment’s what they call sarcasm!) one of which is the much requested “Symlinks” feature. It’s been in practically every other operating system for the past decade+ and is one of the most essential time-saving devices ever to be implemented. For those of you (Windows-dwelling creatures) that don’t know what a symlink is yet, here’s the Wikipedia definition.

Symlinks save tons of space by making files “pretend” to exist where they don’t, but even more importantly is the time they save by allowing you to create/reference a static filepath in all your programs – then have that “file” redirect to the real deal, no matter how often it changes. If you’re a web-dev kinda guy, think of it as mod_rewrite for your hard drive, without the PCRE libraries though… (come to think of it, the first OS to implement regex into symlinks has my vote!)

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