WinLN - A Windows Symbolic Link Manager ~ Wed, 23 May 2012 18:07:42 +0000
Prices on SSDs have been dropping fast lately. I've been wanting one for my gaming computer for some time, and one of the recent deals was very acceptible to me. Which is to say, I just added a new 250GB SSD to my gaming computer. Since I could fill up 250GB with all of my games in a hurry, I decided to manage it a little bit differently. I am using symlinks from my existing installation locations to the new locations on my SSD for the games that I copy over.
This works great. It doesn't matter how the games were installed. The game could have been installed via a traditional installer or via Steam, they still work. I simply move the game from its installed location to my SSD, and then create a symlink from the SSD to the "old" install location, using the original directory name for the link name.
There's a caveat to this, however. When I say "gaming computer," what I really mean is "Windows computer." Since Windows Vista, Windows has supported symlinks (took them long enough), but the CLI for Windows is the worst ever invented. So I needed a way to manage these links easily. There are few GUI tools out there, but they all fall short in at least one of two ways:
- All of the ones I found that were open source were just frontends to the
mklinkutility. - None of them kept a history of the links they created.
Thus, I decided that I would have to write my own tool. That tool is WinLN. It's written against the .NET Framework because writing a GUI for Windows any other way is worse than using a plastic spoon to dig out your own beating heart. It isn't much better with the .NET Framework, either. But it's done, and I think it works quite well. Enjoy.