Published on December 16, 2010
I'm sharing a development environment for some Django projects to be accessed both by a Mac and a Windows 7 PC. Where using additional Django modules I tend to symlink to them from the main project folder. Trouble is the Mac symlink command is incompatible with Windows:
ln -s <source> <target>
All that Windows can see when accessed via Explorer or the command is a file. Conversely I was unable to use a symlink created using mklink on the Windows OS on the Mac:
mklink /d <target> <source>
I'm currently working around this using Windows shortcuts which are named differently in the file tree, allowing me to have both Mac symlinks and Windows shortcuts referring to the same location, within the same directory. Crude but it does work:
15/12/2010 21:18 <DIR> . hg
11/12/2010 15:42 224 .hgignore
16/12/2010 00:50 <DIR> cms
14/12/2010 22:27 1,067 coltrane
15/12/2010 23:25 1,049 coltrane.lnk
14/12/2010 21:36 1,067 filebrowser
15/12/2010 23:27 1,065 filebrowser.lnk
14/12/2010 22:15 1,067 grappelli
15/12/2010 23:27 1,047 grappelli.lnk
12/12/2010 19:52 <DIR> html
While I'm currently happy with this I didn't find any way to share symlinks between Windows and Mac which would mean less maintenance. If anyone could point me in a direction I've missed please let me know.