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grimhike's avatar
grimhike
Helpful | Level 6
4 years ago

Dropbox (Win) not syncing "internal" symlinks created from Dropbox (mac)

On one of my mac computers, I created several symlinks inside Dropbox folder that point to other files or directories also inside the Dropbox folder. Those symlinks are synced to other mac computers ...
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grimhike's avatar
grimhike
Helpful | Level 6
4 years ago

Здравко thanks for chipping in! Your follow-up helped a lot clarify my questions/bug-report. 

 

 

I'm thinking this probably is a bug, as the official documentation from Dropbox reads

 

Symlinks (symbolic links), aliases, shortcuts, junction points, resource forks, and networked folders can be used in the Dropbox folder on your computer to reference other files in the Dropbox folder on your computer. 

(from https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/sync-uploads/symlinks) 

 

I understand the complexity of converting POSIX symlinks to Windows symlink and vice versa. I hope that Dropbox would come up with a reliable implementation of the cross-platform support for symlinks, but in the meantime, at least admits that symlinks do not work cross-platform in the cited documentation and fixes the error messages I'm getting from "file name issue" to something actually addresses the issue and stops bugging me with those meaningless red notifications. 

 

Здравко's avatar
Здравко
Legendary | Level 20
4 years ago
grimhike wrote:

...

I understand the complexity of converting POSIX symlinks to Windows symlink and vice versa. ...

Complexity???! 🧐 What kind of complexity? 🤔

Yes, if we are talking for absolute path within links. Conceptions for FS root in POSIX and in Windows are completely different. BUT, here we are talking for relative path within links, relative to the link position. If we take a look for differences, what will we able find out? -> Different path separator - should be replaced slash to backslash and vice versa. 😁 Is this something complex???! Everything else is the same!

I would wish to every programmer the most complex tasks ever meets to be this level of complexity at most. 😜

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