A while back I was trying to do symbolic links in Windows 7 like you can do in Linux.  I didn’t try too hard as I really didn’t have a good need for it at the time.  Well I recently found a good need for symbolic links so I looked a bit harder.   Not too long later I came across several sites that recommended Link Shell Extension.  After messing around with this a while I can say this does exactly what I want….almost.

For my use I want to be able to share some pictures on FTP for friends to download, but I don’t want to let the FTP program, Filezilla, have access to all my pictures.  I also dodn’t really care to have pictures in two places (my pictures folder and in the FTP folder).  With symbolic links I am able to keep the pictures in my personal pictures folder and then create a symbolic link in the FTP folder.   Now I only have one copy of the pictures on my computer and my FTP folder can only see the pictures that I’ve linked.

Before using this I did a quick test.  If you delete the symbolic link the files are not deleted, but if you go into the folder that is linked and delete a file within it the actual file is deleted.    For how I don’t think I need to use hard links as programs seem to work fine with the symbolic (or soft) links.

The one thing that I was hoping to do was to link files from my external hard drives shared through my ww-drt flashed router.  It seems though that the link shell extension program will only work with local files.  For now not a big deal, but I’ll probably keep my eyes out for a solution.