About This File
What Are Symbolic Links?
Symbolic links are basically advanced shortcuts. Create a symbolic link to an individual file or folder, and that link will appear to be the same as the file or folder to Windows—even though it’s just a link pointing at the file or folder.
For example, let’s say you have a program that needs its files at C:\Program. You’d really like to store this directory at D:\Stuff, but the program requires that its files be at C:\Program. You could move the original directory from C:\Program to D:\Stuff, and then create a symbolic link at C:\Program pointing to D:\Stuff. When you relaunch the program, it will try to access its directory at C:\Program. Windows will automatically redirect it to D:\Stuff, and everything will just work as if it were in C:\Program.
This trick can be used for all sorts of things, including syncing any folder with programs like Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.
There are two type of symbolic links: Hard and soft. Soft symbolic links work similarly to a standard shortcut. When you open a soft link to a folder, you will be redirected to the folder where the files are stored. However, a hard link makes it appear as though the file or folder actually exists at the location of the symbolic link, and your applications won’t know any better. That makes hard symbolic links more useful in most situations.
Note that Windows doesn’t actually use the terms “hard link” and “soft link”. Instead, it uses the terms “hard link” and “symbolic link”. In the Windows documentation, a “symbolic link” is the same thing as a “soft link”. However, the mklink command can create both hard links (known as “hard links” in Windows) and soft links (known as “symbolic links” in Windows).
Help Sources
How to 1: https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/
How to 2: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-take-advantage-of-symbolic-links-in-window-10/
Official Site(Link Shell Extension): https://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html
