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A questão
Leitor de SuperUser Peter Mortensen quer saber porque o Windows continua a usar arquivos de atalho em vez de links simbólicos:
Windows XP and later versions support symbolic links, yet Windows continues to use shortcut files (which essentially store the location of the linked file as text). Why?
Por que o Windows continua a usar arquivos de atalho em vez de links simbólicos?
A resposta
Jonno, o colaborador do SuperUser, tem a resposta para nós:
There are a number of reasons. For example:
- You can store different levels of compatibility against several different shortcuts to the same exe file as they are interpreted by the shell, rather than the file system.
- Certain shortcut links do not actually exist in the file system. Some of them are simply references to GUIDs or special strings interpreted by the shell.
- You cannot include switches in a symbolic link. Sure, you can point to the exe file, but you cannot “tell” that exe file any further arguments.
- You cannot choose an icon for a symbolic link.
- You cannot choose what directory to work from in a symbolic link.
- Shortcut files do not have to point to just files, they can also be hyperlinks or protocol links (like.URL files).
- LNK files can exist on any file system. Symbolic links are handled by the file system itself, in the case of Windows, NTFS.
- There is no real need to replace them. They work, are tiny in size, and can be scaled up in the future should there ever be a need for more functionality to be added to them than what is already listed above.
- Administrative rights are required to create a symbolic link (with good reason), otherwise redirection of innocent files to malicious ones can be executed with very little work.
There are more reasons than this, but I think this is enough to get you started. Here is an MSDN blog link provided by grawity that provides more information about parts of this topic.
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