Basic Windows question

[soccerdad]

Here's what I want to do. I have a program that expects a file in a certain folder (call it folder 1). I would like to put the file in a different folder (call it folder 2)than the program expects it to be in. Is there a way to put something in folder 1 that will redirect the program to look in folder 2? It would be kind of a shortcut I guess, but a shortcut did not work. Unfortunatly I can't configure the program where to look for this file.

[mvallevand]

As long as they are on the same volume on XP you can use NTSF junctions. Here is a a useful utility for this.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinte...ction.mspx

If you want to do specific files you might want to check out hard links too.

Martin

[soccerdad]

Cool, thanks for your help. I will look into it.

[Ted the Penguin]

what you speak of are symbolic links, which arent really a part of windows, on unix and all its children, these work exactly like you say they should, you can have a symbolic link to a file and accessing that link is like accessing that file.

EDIT: ok it looks like windows supports it on directories only, which is weak :p

[mvallevand]

what you speak of are symbolic links, which arent really a part of windows, on unix and all its children, these work exactly like you say they should, you can have a symbolic link to a file and accessing that link is like accessing that file.

EDIT: ok it looks like windows supports it on directories only, which is weak :p

Microsoft has pretty much corrected most of the the "weaknesses" in Vista, but you can "hard link" files too using the their fsutil application.

Martin

[soccerdad]

Ok I read up on it and I am not sure it ntfs junctions will work for my problem. I will give you some more info. I have a program that can use something like a plugin. The program will run fine if the plugin is not there, but you can't use some features unless the plugin is there. I would like to use a flash drive as a "key" by putting the plugin on the flash drive and pointing at it from the expected plugin file location in the program. If the drive is in, I want the feature to work, if the flash drive is out, it should just run without the feature.

Does that make sense? The program is on NTFS and the flash is on FAT. I can reformat the flash to NTFS if that would help.

[Ted the Penguin]

might work, but I dont think so, since you would have to have the whole folder as the symbolic link, it might be ok if the only thing in the folder is that one plugin

[mvallevand]

Does that make sense? The program is on NTFS and the flash is on FAT. I can reformat the flash to NTFS if that would help.

As I said in my original email on XP you need to be on the same volume, which could be considered drives in your example, for this to work. I think it might make more sense to call a vb script file where you have an option to rename the plugin folder before starting your app.

Martin

[Smoker]

There is a better one I use but you have to pay for it.

Which one is that ?

[Ted the Penguin]

you can do most of that stuff with batch files, like defrag, copy/move files, kill/start processes, basically anything that does not require a mouse click