Creating Symbolic Directory Links a GUI
Introduction
I’m a massive DropBox fanboy, I just love it, love it, love it. Up until recently I’ve used it by dragging and dropping stuff in or saving directly into it from the application. Then I came across this post by GrumpyDev which describes how to move Windows Live Writer draft posts into Dropbox by using symbolic directory links.
I hadn’t thought of this before, instead of remembering to move my files about or saving them to places other than the standard documents folder, which I always forget to, I could create symbolic directory links for all the common things I use. I went a bit mad at this point and moved all kinds of folders inside my Dropbox.
The only thing about doing this is, the process is a bit clunky. You have to:
- Create the target
- Copy any existing content to the target
- Delete the folder you want to be a link
- Start cmd.exe and then enter the mklink command along with the full paths of the folders you want to link
I was very surprised to find there is no pretty little one click GUI to do this. So I decided to create one, I was looking for a test app to allow me to practice with TDD and MVC in Winforms and this was a perfect opportunity to.
DirLinker
So there it is, a very basic UI that allows you to enter where you want the link and where you want to link to. You can just delete the link place or copy the contents over first. Use these options at your own risk, I will not be held responsible for any data loss.
Requirements:
- Vista or later (I have tested it on Vista x86 and Win7 x64)
- .NET 3.5
- Admin rights
Download links:
This can now to be downloaded from CodePlex: http://dirlinker.codeplex.com/
DirLinker – source (I do have this in SubVersion at Unfuddled but I can’t make the repo public. When I remove the dependency on Telerik to build, I will move it to CodePlex)
This is only the first version and I have a list of planned updates, which includes:
- A full UI review and remove the dependency on Telerik - Updated 17/01/2010: http://www.humblecoder.co.uk/?p=59
- Add rollback support when an operation fails -
- A general tidy up
- Add a check for .NET 3.5 at start up
- XP support (maybe)
Download, enjoy and please report any bugs.
Works a treat for me
Steve Robbins
5 Jan 10 at 20:22
[...] has created a useful little GUI utility to take some of the pain away. You can grab it over on his blog. [...]
Sync Live Writer Local Drafts Across Multiple Machines with DropBox | GrumpyDev
5 Jan 10 at 20:25
[...] my previous post introducing DirLinker I posted up a short to do list and I can happily check off two of the shorter [...]
DirLinker: An Update at Humblecoder
17 Jan 10 at 12:41
Will:
I want to let you know how your utility helped me today. In my family, we *love* to play Civ IV. We have a shared computer with multiple users and the Civ IV preferences/saves/ini are saved per user. That is actually a good way to do it, but we have some other computers we use (2 laptops) to play multiplayer and I use Windows Live Sync to sync the saves between all the computers so it won’t matter who starts/loads the game… the saves all end up on all computers. This is great for single player games too… no matter which computer you use, you can load your saved games. However, since we’ve moved to multiple user accounts on Win 7… our save files are in our user files and syncing them all between accounts and computers is not as simple as we want. I decided to create a junction from each “saves” folder to a common save folder on another drive. This would allow me to sync that single folder with the other computers and all users can access all saves from anyone’s account. I’d used mklink before, but the folders I was working with were long and deep and I kept typing the command incorrectly and leaving out quotes due to spaces in the directory names. I was getting frustrated when I found a link to your utility in a comment here: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/22/create-symbolic-links-hard-links-and-directory-junctions-in-vista-with-mklink/
I decided to check it out and want to say thank you! You saved my sanity and a bunch of time this AM. Great tool.
Scott
13 Feb 10 at 03:11
[...] If you have no idea what Directory Linker is, this is a good place to start. VN:F [1.8.7_1070]please wait…Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes [...]
Directory Linker 2 at Humblecoder
3 May 10 at 08:15