Hardlinks?

[gordon-creAtive]

Recently I stumpled upon this page, which describes the poorly documented symbolic and hard link feature in Windows 2000+, which is well known in the Unix world: http://shell-shocked.org/article.php?id=284

In my opinion, implementing this in LaunchBase instead of the "file copy"-method would have several advantages:

• General speedup
  
• Crashes won't screw LaunchBase since it doesn't need to copy changed files (like savegames) back into the mods directory or delete any files in order to run normally again
  
• It even works across a LaunchBase reinstall!
  

Marshall, what do you think about this idea? Is it even possible to implement with VisualBasic? Also I don't know how YR will react to symbolic/hard links but I think at least hard links should't be a problem.

[offtopic]Scheiße ist mein Englisch eingerostet [/offtopic]

[DCoder]

Well, if VB doesn't support it, he can always execute mklink manually

I just tested by hardlinking ares.dll, ares.dll.inj and rulesmd.ini to a different folder. Worked just fine. W7 Pro x64.

[Renegade]

That sounds like a very good idea to me.

This can even be used to have multiple concurrent Ares versions downloaded - just download Ares versions into a folder Ares/[branch name]/, and then create links Ares.dll → Ares/[branch name]/Ares.dll.
That would make re-acquisition of files after a branch switch only necessary if something was updated, or the respective branch wasn't downloaded yet.

[AlexB]

Hard links are only supported on NTFS. But the poor people still running on FAT do have other problems. Is anybody using FAT32 these days?
Windows uses hard links for its own system files, so this isn't some kind of esoteric stuff.

[Nighthawk]

Hard links are only supported on NTFS. But the poor people still running on FAT do have other problems. Is anybody using FAT32 these days?

Anyone still using Windows XP Home Edition will likely be using FAT32. But other versions of XP and anything higher should be using NTFS by default.

[Blade]

Nonsense, most installations of even XP home are to NTFS formatted drives by default. If they aren't yet ntfs, the convert command will upgrade them. Only Win98/millenium users will be stuck.