Today I learned about a very useful command in Windows Vista: mklink. We create hard and soft links with mklink just like with Unix like operating system's ln command. Especially the soft links are useful, because we can create a link which points to another file or directory. The link can be accessed as if we access the original file or directory.
Personally I like to create a bin directory at the root of my drive and put it in the PATH variable. In this bin I create soft links to the executables I want accessible from the PATH variable. This way I don't have to add a lot of directories to the PATH environment variable.
mkdir \bin cd bin mklink java.exe %JAVA_HOME%\bin\java.exe
If we run the dir command we can see which files are links, because they are denoted by <SYMLINK>.
We can also use the mklink command to shorten deep directory names. For example if I work on a project in the directory C:\Users\hkleinikkink\data\work\projects\client\applications\dev I want to use the short name currentproject:
mklink /D C:\currentproject C:\Users\hkleinikkink\data\work\projects\client\applications\dev cd \currentproject
To remove a directory link we must use the rmdir and not the del command. del will delete all files in the directory.
