Symlinks in Windows

Not strictly a LAMP tip this as it's for Windows but I found it useful recently.

I'm using the rather awesome XAMPP to do some development for one of my personal sites on my Windows machine and I wanted to symlink my codebase into XAMPP's equivalent of a 'public_html' folder (they call it 'htdocs'). I tried simply creating a shortcut but this doesn't work as a shortcut isn't a direct pointer but is a file in itself so Apache just tries to read that file.

After much Googling I discovered that, since Vista, Microsoft have introduced a symlinking function, MKLINK:

MKLINK /D C:\path\to\link C:\path\to\target

The /D specifies a link to a directory as the default is to a file.

This worked a treat on my Windows 7 machine! Who knew Vista introduced something useful?! ;)