symlink on FAT filesystem


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Thread: symlink on FAT filesystem

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Posts
    2

    Question symlink on FAT filesystem

    My hd contains three Fat-partitions mounted as
    /common.
    /windows/boot
    /windows/prog

    They all can be mounted by any user, read and write.

    The /common directory is used to share files beween users under linux and windows.

    Now I want to create some links there.
    I tried:
    cd /windows/boot/windows/desktop
    ln -s /common/downloads
    But I got the error-message: "Operation not permitted."
    All linuxusers have a link like that in their homedirectory. It works.

    I searched the internet for that and found someone, who said FAT can't use symbolic links.

    But I'm shure it must be working somehow.
    Before I reinstalled my complete system I had some links on my windows partition.
    This was just a test. I wanted to see what windows does, when it's confronted with links created under linux.
    It did'n even recognize them as links and handled them as real files.
    So I had a 3.6GB patition containing a 8GB directory. hehe

    just can't remember how I made it.

    any ideas?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Dec 1999
    Location
    Toronto
    Posts
    39,307
    I'm not sure if symlinks are allowed on fat/fat32 partitions.

    You could try the full path

    ln -s /mnt/windows/boot/windows/desktop/common/downloads <link target>

    or leave off the '/'

    cd /windows/boot/windows/desktop

    ln -s common/downloads <target>
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  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Posts
    2
    No. These two don't work.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Apr 2001
    Location
    SF Bay Area, CA
    Posts
    14,936
    There is a very small chance that it supports links, just not symbolic links. Try getting rid of the -s option to ln.

    Though I still very much doubt that it'll work. Nothing in the FAT32 filesystem could be emulated as a link... I'm not sure what you were doing before, but it wasn't a symlink on a FAT32 partition.

    Actually, it might have been a symlink inside a Samba share (a Linux filesystem underneath), which would act like it was just the target file.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jul 2013
    Posts
    1
    Alternatively you can use mount command with bind option
    eg.
    mount --bind target-dir existing-empty-source-dir

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