Symbol Link in MSYS on WIN7

As we know the symbol link command 'ln' in MinGW is fake that it creates copy instead of real link in *nix file system.

A good news is on Win7 its new NTFS support symbol link feature! With "mklink" command in Windows Command Prompt, we could easily do so like below:

mklink [/d] link target

So it won't be hard to implement a "mklink" for MinGW like below:

#!/bin/bash

#####################################################
#
# (c) Copyright 2012 Clark. All Rights Reserved.
# 2012-08-29
#
#####################################################

Usage() {
cat<<EOF
mklink [-d] target link.
    -d      create a directory symbolic link
    target  path (relative or absolute) that link refers to
    link    the new symbolic link name
EOF
exit 1
}

if [[ -z "$2" ]]; then
    Usage
elif [[ "$3" != "" && "$1" != "-d"  ]]; then
    Usage
fi

if [[ "$3" != "" ]]; then
    ISDIR="/D"
    TARGET="$2"
    LINK="$3"
else
    TARGET="$1"
    LINK="$2"
fi

# if starts with '/', a absolute path
if [[ "${TARGET:0:1}" == "/" ]]; then
    ROUTE=$(echo "$TARGET" | sed 's,^/\([c-z]\)/,\1:/,')
    if [[ "$ROUTE" == "$TARGET" ]]; then
        ROUTE=$(echo "$3" | sed 's,^/,'$MSYS',')
    fi
else
    ROUTE="$TARGET"
fi

ROUTE=$(echo "$ROUTE" | sed 's,/,\\,g')

CMD=$(echo mklink $ISDIR $LINK \"$ROUTE\")
#echo $CMD
cmd /c "$CMD"

Please be noted that according to this article if you want to remove a directory symbol link in Win7 you should only use 'rmdir' (both available in CMD and MSYS). The 'del' command in CMD will delete all your files in the source directory!!!

A typical use case

You have created your awesome .vimrc and .vim in MSYS and you want to re-use them in gvim:

cd "$USERPROFILE"
# below 2 links makes your Windows gvim load resource directly from 
# you MSYS configurations.
mklink /c/MinGW/msys/1.0/home/user/.vimrc _vimrc
mklink /c/MinGW/msys/1.0/home/user/.vim vimfiles.
# and if you want to invoke gvim from MSYS
cd ~
mklink .vim vimfiles
# a link for _vimrc is not necessary
alias gvim="/c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Vim/vim73/gvim.exe"
# to start gvim in background
gvim <FILENAME> &