windows symlinks & hardlinks

Low and behold windows does indeed have symlinks. At least windows 2000+ has it on NTFS 5 based filesystems. Microsoft does not seem to endorse the usage of symlinks but does provide utilities to manipulate them in its Resourse Kits. If you happen to have those installed check out the linkd command which is used to create the junction points (aka symlinks). There are also gui utilities to handle their creation and removal.

In addition to symlink support, there are indeed hardlink's availible to a windows user. I believe that the practice of hard linking should be avoided under windows they same way it is under unix. I have not yet checked to see if the linux filesystem driver supports symlinks and hardlinks, but I can only hope it does.