Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
Since Copy recognizes it as a file, all the other applications can also. There must be a reason the developers of Dropbox, Google etc block it.
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Say rather, that an application can explicitly include code to recognize a .lnk shortcut file, determine the .lnk's destination, and do something with that destination.
It is by no means automatically recognized (so the developers of DropBox, Google, et al. are not evilly blocking it, they just haven't put in the work to special-case those files).
This is a design choice by Microsoft.
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As I said, on Linux and Mac OSX (both based on unix), there are symlinks instead of shortcuts.
A symlink exists at the filesystem level, a shortcut exists at the OS level.
A symlink is automatically recognized as the destination file by any application code that accesses "files".
A shortcut is a data file which contains a reference to the location of the file it points to, and applications that access "files", see a file with random, useless data.
Windows Explorer has special code which recognizes shortcuts and opens the destination.
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That being said, Windows has moved on from the XP era, and there are utilities out there that can create links which resemble symlinks more than shortcuts. Those *should* work even for Dropbox.
e.g. see the "mklink" command-line utility that comes preinstalled on Windows Vista and on.