Inspired by today’s conversation with Ilya, a new bunch of features is coming as a part of NTFS Links update. It will hook into shell’s copy/move/rename/delete operations suggesting useful options. Stay tuned.
Things that make sense:
Directories, which are not reparse points (ie. soft links)Move – nothing we can help withCopy – whenever possible suggest soft link creation // Implemented
Delete – nothing we can help withRename – nothing we can help withDirectories, which are reparse pointsMove – optional informational warning on moving a link // Implemented
Copy – warn on copying a link, suggest options to (a) create another soft link to the directory being copied and (b) create another soft link to the target directory of the original soft link // ImplementedDelete – informational warning on deleting a link, an option to delete target as well (makes little sense though) // Implemented without the mentioned option
Rename – nothing we can help with
- Files
Move– nothing we can help with- Copy – option to create a hard link instead of copying, by default attempt to create a hard link and if failed notify user and allow standard operation
Delete – nothing we can help withRename – nothing we can help with
All the mentioned additional features make also sense being exposed as additional context menu entries (probably cascaded or optionally cascaded since there might be rather many of them).
Just for the sake of being complete, I’ll add some more suggestions.
Filenames which are just one of many hard links for actual files
– Move – nothing we can help with
– Copy (within volume) – option to create one more hard link or to create a full copy of the file with its contents
– Delete – notify that by deleting this file one would not free any disc space because there are more names for this file, with the list following (maybe suggest deleting of all names with default “No”)
– Rename – if, before renaming, names of all hard links to the this file are the same, suggest “synchronizing” the name
Application-level shortcuts (the .lnk’s):
– Add a “convert to hard link” menu item when on the same NTFS volume
Just some ideas, not that I needed all that stuff much :-) However, .lnk to hard link converter would be handy in my case, because I have many shortcuts to convert here.
Out of curiosity, do you have a lot of .lnk shortcuts? I personally did not find them useful enough and have almost no .lnks created manually.
From my first comment:
“because I have many shortcuts to convert here.”
In my Music folder I used shortcuts to tracks in compilations instead of making their full copy from albums. I used them heavily before finding you small tool, so currently that what I am indeed doing: converting lnks to hardlinks, by hand. That’s why this idea came to my mind.
If you think it’s useless, just forget it: anyway it’s not too smart to implement something if there’s only one person to use it – once :-)
Important is if it makes more or less sense, not only how many people uses it :)