Symlink/shortcut that works in Windows and Linux

[Member Andy3142]

I’ve got a folder on Dropbox with Windows shortcuts to many files throughout Dropbox. How can I make these work whether I access the folder from Windows or from Linux?

If I use Windows shortcuts, these don’t work at all in Linux.

I’ve installed a Windows app called Link Shell Extention (LSE). In Windows this lets me “pick a link source” in the target directory and then “drop as symlink” or “drop as hardlink” in the shortcut directory.

However in Linux, the things that LSE calls symlinks are text files that don’t link to anything. The hardlinks aren’t links at all, they duplicate the orginal target file as a file, not as a link, in the shortcut directory.

There must be a way this works??

Many thanks

Andy

• This topic was modified 6 months ago by Andy3142.

[Member haertig]

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I don’t know anything about Dropbox specifically. But it’s a little humorous that “symlinks”, “hard links”, and “directories” work in Windows but not Linux. Since these terms came from the Linux/Unix environment. Windows calls these things “short cuts” and “folders” I believe. Also, in Linux/Unix, everything is a “file”. Directories are a file (albeit a special type of file). A “hard link” is simply two or more inodes pointing to the same piece of data.

The things you are talking about are functions of the “file system”. File systems that Windows understands natively are FAT and NTFS (are there others?) Linux understands a whole lot more filesystems natively … including FAT and NTFS (used to be, many years ago, that you had to load a module for Linux to understand NTFS, but that was done away with a long time ago and support is built into the kernel now). Dropbox might well use it’s own concoction of a filesystem, I have no idea about that since I don’t use Dropbox. And it could well be that Dropbox is the culprit in your problem, not Linux or Windows. There may be other things you get tripped up on in Dropbox. One thing that comes to mind is that Dropbox will mangle filenames often used by some apps, like “Calibre” for example. If you have the pound sign (#) in a filename, which is a perfectly legal character, Dropbox will mangle things because it uses the # character for something totally different – versioning I think.

Once you put a middleman like Dropbox in your file storage and transfer between systems, you should be very careful about how you do things. Does it respect case sensitive file names? Does it allow the full character set you are used to using in file names? Does it support links like you asked about? Can you have spaces in the filenames? What is the maximum length of a file name? Can you “escape” a special character in a filename? Is there a limitation on maximum file size? Maximum number of entries in a directory?
Do files have a concept of ownership and permissions? Are the permissions owner/group/everyone like in Linux/Unix, or something else?

Lots of things can screw you up. As a general rule, you should stay very basic and target the lowest common denominator. Usually that “lowest” thing is Windows, but in your case, it could be Dropbox.

[Forum Admin rokytnji]

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Here you go

antix control center > software > package installer. Then search for dropbox. Install it. That should give you access to your dropbox account.
I am in the process of installing in mine now. Got to this part and quit for myself.

Sign in or create an account to connect this computer to your Dropbox account. If you didn’t request this, please close this browser tab.

I made a launcher in personal menu in my Icewm install.
prog "dropbox" /usr/share/icons/papirus-antix/24x24/apps/dropbox.png dropbox start -i

Now I’ll unistall it because I don’t remember my old account settings and use hard drives instead for backup instead cloud.

• This reply was modified 6 months ago by rokytnji.

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How to Search for AntiX solutions to your problems

[Member seaken64]

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I think you need to ask in a Dropbox forum. Dropbox is a subscription service and has some unique requirements not built into antiX. There may be someone here who uses it with antiX. But we’ll have to wait for such a person to come along.

I use Google Drive as my cloud storage. But I don’t use it as a normal file system. I keep them separate. My backups are done to Windows shares and local USB hard drives.

Seaken64

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