Create symbolic links or junctions instead of copy.

Suggestions and feature requests.
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newlight
Posts: 20
Joined: 27.09.2008, 06:24

Create symbolic links or junctions instead of copy.

#1 Post by newlight » 04.12.2012, 08:03

Hello all,
I think it would be extremely helpful to implement such a feature: When you open the copy menu, to have a checkbox saying "Create symbolic links (for files) or junctions (for folders) instead of copying."
Windows XP already implemented junctions (symbolic links for folders)
Windows 7 also has the cool feature of making symbolic links to files. To me, that's the biggest feature of Windows 7 after the 4GB memory limit fix.

The applications of symbolic links are innumerable. I will give just a few examples:
- You have a folder with sub-folders containing animation movies, organized by producer (Pixar, Dreamworks, etc.). Then you want to make another folder where you keep the movies organized by the year of release. Therefore each year folder will contain just symbolic links.
- You have a folder with cartoons, sorted by title and you want to create folders with cartoons that feature Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, etc. If a cartoon contains all three of the characters, you keep it where it is, and you just create symbolic links to that cartoon, in all the three folders.
- You filter the files in a folder and you want to inspect those files. Instead of copying them into another folder and then inspecting them one by one, you simply make symbolic links to those files and you can inspect them. Say you want to inspect 15 movies from 100, instead of copying 15 big files of 2GB each, you just create symbolic links on the other folder, saving a lot of disk space and time.

In all the cases above, it would be extremely useful to have the option to quickly create symbolic links.
Not sure how many people realize how useful symbolic links are, but I suspect most of the people won't realize what a powerful feature they are until a file manager will implement it. Going in the command line to create symbolic links will not become popular anytime soon.

Thanks

Karol
Posts: 963
Joined: 19.08.2007, 12:05

Re: Create symbolic links or junctions instead of copy.

#2 Post by Karol » 04.12.2012, 09:19

Have you tried FreeCommander XE file containers (View->New file container tab)?

newlight
Posts: 20
Joined: 27.09.2008, 06:24

Re: Create symbolic links or junctions instead of copy.

#3 Post by newlight » 22.12.2012, 22:57

Yes, I just tried it, it's really a cool feature, useful for situations described in the third example. It would be very good to have a keyboard shortcut, by the way.

However, creating symbolic links is much more powerful than that, please Marek implement this feature!

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Dreamer
Site Admin
Posts: 6113
Joined: 19.08.2007, 23:40

Re: Create symbolic links or junctions instead of copy.

#4 Post by Dreamer » 22.12.2012, 23:15

Please support my File Containers suggestions, it would be much better with these features...

mrkam
Posts: 3
Joined: 07.07.2012, 00:04

Re: Create symbolic links or junctions instead of copy.

#5 Post by mrkam » 15.01.2013, 13:34

Would file containers work outside FreeCommander? IMHO symbolic links and junctions should be supported as they're OS-level features. FAR does support them, what's wrong with FreeCommander?

Scott_Y
Posts: 504
Joined: 02.10.2009, 04:46
Location: Colorado, USA

Re: Create symbolic links or junctions instead of copy.

#6 Post by Scott_Y » 19.01.2013, 06:34

mrkam wrote:... FAR does support them, what's wrong with FreeCommander?
It's not that there's anything "wrong" with FC, but that Marek has many features and priorities to work on.

For me personally, creating symlinks is not a high-priority for FC because I hardly ever need to do it -- maybe once a year. And for that I can use other means such as the free SymLinker http://code.google.com/p/symlinker/

However, for users who often create symlinks, I can understand that it would be very convenient to do so from within FC.

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