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Mercurial allows versioning symlinks in a repository. On unix they are created as symlinks on checkout while on windows symlinks are not supported.

Instead Mercurial apparently creates a "special" text-file for each symlink with its content being the target of the symlink. By modifying the content of this text file on a windows machine, one can change the target of the "symlink". (See this SO answer.)

Is it similarly possible to create a new symlink in a Mercurial repository on a Windows machine?

I imagine this would involve creating the "special text" file and then somehow telling mercurial to treat it as a symlink. Possibly with a workaround similar to this workaround for setting the executable bit.

Community
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ARF
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1 Answers1

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I don't have a Mercurial installation on Windows to try this, but using hg import (possibly hg import --no-commit) for the following file seems to work on OS X and should work on Windows:

diff --git a/link b/link
new file mode 120000
--- /dev/null
+++ b/link
@@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
+other/file
\ No newline at end of file

Replace link with the name of the file that's supposed to be the symlink and other/file with the name of the file that it is to link to.

Note that the last line is important; it prevents a newline from being added to the end of the path.

Reimer Behrends
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