First of all, howdy and welcome to the Monastery, meistersinger! (Nice username, BTW.)

I've just looked into this for a bit on a windows 7 box, using Strawberry 5.20.0, and I've found that links (to directories) appear to only be recognized and handled properly when two conditions are met:

  1. The source and target of the link share the same name.
  2. The target of the link is not a "localized" directory.

Following a link from e.g. C:\Users\AppleFritter\Desktop\Games to C:\Games works; the former exists (-e), is seen as a directory (-d), and can be opendir'ed. Changing the link's name to e.g. C:\Users\AppleFritter\Desktop\MoreGames causes it to cease working.

OTOH, following a link from e.g. C:\Users\AppleFritter\Desktop\Users to C:\Users does not work. (I should note that this is a localized version of windows, albeit configured to use English as its system language; maybe an unlocalized English version wouldn't have this problem.)

All this remains true when running as an Administrator, BTW, so I don't think it's a permissions problem.

I don't know whether this indicates a bug in perl, windows, or both. My suggestion would be to just work around this; the easiest solution might be to make sure you don't need to follow any links in the first place. Perhaps shuffle the data around on your external drive as necessary, if that's an option.

In reply to Re: links in pathnames under Windows 8 by AppleFritter
in thread links in pathnames under Windows 8 by meistersinger

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