NTFS is the filesystem that Windows uses in all of its professional versions. There are tons of hidden features in NTFS that most of us haven’t even heard about. One of them is called Junction Points.
Junctions are hard links to files/folders which reside in other locations. Think of them as shortcuts but without the shortcomings. Shortcuts are actually just pointer files (.LNK files) which just has a reference to a different location. If you double click on it you are taken to that location. We have all used shortcuts so I’ll stop here.
Hard-links to files have existed in unix/linux filesystems and have been used for decades. It also has been present in the NTFS but for some reason it wasn’t publicised and nobody talks about it. I just started working on a project where I needed to use it and I wanted to share it with everyone here while I was working on it.
With junction points you mount a folder in location A to a folder in location B and be able to access all the files in folder A in the folder B. E.g. you can create link to C:\Windows\System32 to C:\TofiBaba folder. So if you look into that second folder u’d see all the files and folders residing in the system32 folder.
Mark Russinovich of SysInternals has written tons of little utilities (including NewSID) to make lives of sys-admins a lot easier. One of the ones that comes in very handy for me is called Junction. This little utility lets you not only create and delete those junction points but also lets you see if there exists any junctions in a folder (or recursive folders). Most of his utilities were taken over by Microsoft and are now available from their download and technet sites. Junction is one of them:
There are tons of uses of creating junction points. You can read about those in detail on this Wiki site:
NTFS junction point - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Please feel free to hit me (or any of the other techies here) with questions on details on this or other NTFS functionalities. Another one to look up is Alternate Data Streams (ADS), you may have seen this in antivirus applications.
Enjoy this teeny utility!!
