Distinguishing between different types of links on Windows

[oliversalzburg]

• Node.js Version: 8.12.0
• OS: Windows 10
• Scope (install, code, runtime, meta, other?): runtime
• Module (and version) (if relevant): fs

On Windows, when we create a symlink, we are given the options to create a file or directory symlink or a junction. How can I determine if an existing entity is a file or directory symlink or a junction?

stats.isSymbolicLink() will return true for all 3 types and I did not find an API that would provide more detail.

This is in reference to: jprichardson/node-fs-extra#626

[benjamingr]

@nodejs/windows

[Hakerh400]

@nodejs/windows

According to the collaborator guide, the team name is @nodejs/platform-windows

[benjamingr]

@Hakerh400 you're right, I'm just on holiday and not on my PC :) @nodejs/platform-windows for an actual ping. Thanks for catching this!

(Pretty funny since I was a team member for ~2 years 😅)

[tniessen]

I'm not sure whether it makes sense to implement this. Anyway, all three types are probably of type FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT and this document might be relevant for distinguishing them.

[oliversalzburg]

I have already implemented this at https://github.com/oliversalzburg/is-junction

[tniessen]

@oliversalzburg You seem to be doing exactly what I suggested :) Is this issue resolved then?

[oliversalzburg]

@tniessen I was hoping for a solution in Node itself 😢

[gireeshpunathil]

@oliversalzburg - is this resolved? please feel to contribute as a PR, if you have specific proposals to improve!

[oliversalzburg]

@gireeshpunathil I have no reason to believe that it was resolved and nobody qualified ever responded to my inquires.

[gireeshpunathil]

@oliversalzburg - I checked the code and see what you are saying. Basically it is a good to have feature (to further specialize on the link info); but prospects of being implemented in core may depend on strength of the use case and number of people asking for it, and hence I suggested a PR in the previous comment.

[tniessen]

nobody qualified ever responded to my inquires.

@oliversalzburg This kind of makes it sound as if the person who did respond, me, is unqualified. I will kindly assume that you did not actually mean to imply that.

I opened libuv/libuv#2384. libuv is responsible for platform-specific IO.

[oliversalzburg]

@tniessen I posted here in the hope to learn how to achieve this in NodeJS, because I didn't think that this is impossible. I didn't read your response as a definitive "This is currently not possible", so I assumed we were still waiting for someone who knows how to do it.

Given that months had passed since I asked about this, I already went ahead and wrote the module I linked, which wasn't an acceptable solution for the node-fs-extra members and the issue remains unresolved.

I doubt many people would ask for the ability to distinguish link types explicitly, but it ultimately leads to extremely hard to debug issues when using the affected code in node-fs-extra.

Thanks for opening the linked issue.