Symbolic link / Hard link on Windows

Symbolic link

AKA SymLink / Soft link

• Symbolic link contains the text of target path
• If target move / remove, the link is broken

Hard link

• Hard link is meta data of the file, that is inode on Linux
• If target move / remove, the link is broken

Ref: mklink only available on cmd, not on PowerShell

Create symbolic link

cmd

mklink <link> <source>

PowerShell

New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path "<link>" -Target "<source>"

Create symbolic link for directory

cmd

mklink /d <link> <source>

PowerShell

New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path "<link>" -Target "<source>"

Create hard link

cmd

mklink /h <link> <source>

PowerShell

New-Item -ItemType HardLink -Path "<link>" -Target "<source>"

Create directory junction

Hard link for directory

PowerShell

New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path "<link>" -Target "<source>"

cmd

mklink /j <link> <source>