Symbolic links have more functionality, while junctions almost seem to be a legacy feature because of their limitations, but the security implications of these limitations are specifically why a junction might be preferred over a symbolic link. Remote targeting makes symbolic links more functional, but also raises their security profile, while junctions are safer because … Read more
There are other processes in Windows that want a piece of that file. The search indexer is an obvious candidate. Or a virus scanner. They’ll open the file for full sharing, including FILE_SHARE_DELETE, so that other processes aren’t heavily affected by them opening the file. That usually works out well, unless you create/write/delete at a … Read more
Unix filesystems use reference counting and a two-layer architecture for finding files. The filename refers to something called an inode, for information node or index node. The inode stores (a pointer to) the file contents as well as some metadata, such as the file’s type (ordinary, directory, device, etc.) and who owns it. Multiple filenames … Read more
⸻⸻ Short answer ⸻⸻ Define environment variable: CYGWIN=winsymlinks:nativestrict As pointed out by mwm you may also have to go to the settings or to run bash as Administrator. See the Notes section. ⸻⸻ Long answer ⸻⸻ Default Cygwin symlinks are just regular files By default Cygwin creates text files as workaround for Windows symlink flaw. … Read more
You can enumerate all the files on a volume using FSCTL_ENUM_USN_DATA. This is a fast process (my tests returned better than 6000 records per second even on a very old machine, and 20000+ is more typical) and only includes files that currently exist. The data returned includes the file flags as well as the USNs … Read more
NTFS stores filenames in UTF-16, however fopen is using ANSI (not UTF-8). In order to use an UTF16-encoded file name you will need to use the Unicode versions of the file open calls. Do this by defining UNICODE and _UNICODE in your project. Then use the CreateFile call or the wfopen call.
Here is a version for C# using System.Runtime.InteropServices; class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var mainStream = NativeMethods.CreateFileW( “testfile”, NativeConstants.GENERIC_WRITE, NativeConstants.FILE_SHARE_WRITE, IntPtr.Zero, NativeConstants.OPEN_ALWAYS, 0, IntPtr.Zero); var stream = NativeMethods.CreateFileW( “testfile:stream”, NativeConstants.GENERIC_WRITE, NativeConstants.FILE_SHARE_WRITE, IntPtr.Zero, NativeConstants.OPEN_ALWAYS, 0, IntPtr.Zero); } } public partial class NativeMethods { /// Return Type: HANDLE->void* ///lpFileName: LPCWSTR->WCHAR* ///dwDesiredAccess: DWORD->unsigned int ///dwShareMode: … Read more
Here’s some advice from someone with an environment where we have folders containing tens of millions of files. A folder stores the index information (links to child files & child folder) in an index file. This file will get very large when you have a lot of children. Note that it doesn’t distinguish between a … Read more
Individual components of a filename (i.e. each subdirectory along the path, and the final filename) are limited to 255 characters, and the total path length is limited to approximately 32,000 characters. However, on Windows, you can’t exceed MAX_PATH value (259 characters for files, 248 for folders). See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx for full details.