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From: alexande@borland.com (Mark Alexander)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Re: Symbolic link in MS-DOS
Message-ID: <1991May29.165933.12688@borland.com>
Date: 29 May 91 16:59:33 GMT
References: <1991May29.153829.8742@bullet.ecf.toronto.edu>
Organization: Borland International
Lines: 19

In article <1991May29.153829.8742@bullet.ecf.toronto.edu> xiaoy@bullet.ecf (XIAO  Yan) writes:
>When I used chkdsk and I was told two files were cross linked to the
>same cluster [...] so I assume that it is feasible to have symbolic link...

Unfortunately, no.  It's possible to have a corrupted file system
where two directory entries have the same starting cluster number, as
in your case.  This is more like a UNIX hard link than a symbolic
link.  But DOS doesn't keep a link count in an inode anywhere, so if
you delete one or both of the directory entries, Bad Things will
happen to your data in short order.

>... it should also be possible to have cross directory rename
>command (rather than 'copy-delete' scheme which sometimes is hard to do).

The DOS rename function (INT 21H, AH=56H) is actually capable of
moving a file from one directory to another on the same disk.  The REN
command doesn't use it, though, in the attempt to be compatible with
DOS 1.0 (gack).  You could use the rename() function in your C compiler
library to write a trivial 'mv' program that does what you want.