Editing Symbolic link (section)

===Cygwin symbolic links===
[[Cygwin]] simulates POSIX-compliant symbolic links in the Microsoft Windows file system. It uses identical programming and user utility interfaces as Unix (see above), but creates Windows shortcuts (.lnk files) with additional information used by Cygwin at the time of symlink resolution. Cygwin symlinks are compliant with the POSIX standard in terms of how they are resolved, and with Windows standards in terms of their on-disk representation.

Additionally, Cygwin can be set up to support native Windows symbolic links which can be used out of Cygwin without restrictions.<ref name="cygwin">{{Cite web|title=Chapter 3. Using Cygwin|url=https://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html |access-date=2021-07-08|website=www.cygwin.com}}</ref> This requires:
# Changing the CYGWIN environment variable to contain {{tt|winsymlinks:native}};
# Running the Cygwin with elevated rights because Windows restricts the creation of symbolic links to privileged users

Some differences exist, however. Cygwin has no way to specify shortcut-related information – such as working directory or icon – as there is no place for such parameters in <code>ln -s</code> command. To create standard Microsoft .lnk files Cygwin provides the <code>mkshortcut</code> and <code>readshortcut</code> utilities.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Using Cygwin effectively with Windows|url=https://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-effectively.html#id325160}}</ref>

The Cygwin User's Guide has more information on this topic.<ref name="cygwin"/> [[MSYS2]], which is based on Cygwin, has a similar set of {{tt|winsymlinks}} settings but defaults to copying the files.<ref name=msys2-sym>{{cite web|url=https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/issues/249 |title=Coreutils: ln --symbolic creates hard links (MSYS2-packages #249)| website=GitHub}}</ref>