Any Linux NTFS drivers which can create symlinks that work in Windows?

manpreet Best Answer 3 years ago

I'm dual-booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04 and am using NTFS-3G to mount my NTFS drives in Ubuntu. My fstab mount options are defaults,relatime,inherit,hide_dot_files,big_writes,dmask=002,fmask=002,uid=1000,gid=1000.

Is there a mount option or recommended driver to create Windows compatible symlinks on an NTFS filesystem via Linux? On the Windows side of things, my user has the Create symbolic linkspermission, links created via WSL work fine in both Windows and Linux. These are "real" symbolic links and not just a copy of the file. However, links created via Linux do not work in Windows (with the exception of Git/Bash for Windows which seems to have special handling).

I've spent a few hours trying to find a solution but both kernel and fuse FS drivers are beyond me. It appears that NTFS-3G does not set the system.ntfs_reparse_data attribute for links that it creates. I'm not sure if anything else is required to indicate to Windows that the file is a symlink, possibly setting the system attribute if it's not already.

Currently I'm running a script periodically in Windows which recurses an entire directory to look for anything that looks like a Linux symlink and then recreates it in Windows so that it works in both OS'. This takes ~10 minutes on an SSD with about 100,000 files in the directory.