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From: Ryan Cumming <ryan@completely.kicks-ass.org>
To: Kurt Wall <kwall@kurtwerks.com>
Subject: Re: vfat patch for shortcut display as symlinks for 2.4.18
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 19:42:53 -0700
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On June 12, 2002 19:25, Kurt Wall wrote:
> That's *precisely* the point I tried to make. .desktop files are just
> plain text files, as far as Unix is concerned. They do not map neatly
> to Windows .lnk files because the kernel's file system layer does
> not handle them specially, as it does symlinks. God and Bill Gates
> alone know how Windows handles .lnk files, but it does seem that Windows
> imputes to them special semantics, rather like a shell script.

No, some people actually know how Windows works. The kernel has very little to 
do with .lnk files, and in fact it sees them as regular files. If you run 
"notepad foo.lnk", you will see the link's binary contents. If you use the 
CreateFile or OpenFile kernel calls, you will get a file handle pointing to 
the link's contents. If you attempt to execute a .lnk file from the command 
line or using CreateProcess, it will horribly fail.

In fact, to dereference a link in userspace, you must open the .lnk file, 
examine its contents with a library call, and then open the destination file.  
This is extremely similar to how Gnome or KDE handle .desktop files: mainly 
in the shell.

- -Ryan
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