How Noob Is This?- Whats The Linux Equivalent Of A Windows Shortcut?

[manouche]

I have asked this on the ubuntu forums but no one has touched it with a barge-pole. I am beginning to suspect its the Linux Achilles heel or the question no one wants to mention, like a demented relative locked-up in the basement anyway here what I put:

I have been using ubuntu for about 4 months now and I am loving the power! One thing is really frustrating me though and I'm sure I'm not the only one with the problem(I have seen simmilar posts but no really satis answer.

The scenario is this: as an (ex?) Windows user I have built up a uniform and hierarchical storage structure on my home server and/or NAS, with media mapped to one drive and docs and files on another. This works fantastically for the windows network as all references and links are consistent. eg. for playlists the entries are the mapped media drive so even though the mp3s actually live on my external USB drive (comming up as say drive E:) a script maps the media folder to M: on any of my systems or any of my storage media so the paths are always correct. Also in my projects subfolders I have shortcuts to other relevant project folders or documents so I dont have to duplicate anything.

Now with Linux I can still map windows shares after mounting them, I will just have to re-do the playlist etc entries (grep will help). but the deal breaker is that symlinks are not supported across the network, unlike plain old windows shortcuts and there is no unix equivalent! The closest I have come as an alternative is dropping nautilus script files which opens an instance at the location referred to, inelegant or what!?!

I am also working on a script which is added to the right click which will extract the location info from the windows .LNK shortcuts and open nautilus there but I am sure I must be missing something obvious for such a critical function... help!

(sorry for the long post but I wanted to be clear).

[Sparda]

Linux doesn't have shortcuts as such, just has application launchers (which is what shortcuts are). I do not believe application launcher files are standardized between Gnome, KDE etc., but as long as you stick to one you'll be fine.

[manouche]

Linux doesn't have shortcuts as such, just has application launchers (which is what shortcuts are). I do not believe application launcher files are standardized between Gnome, KDE etc., but as long as you stick to one you'll be fine.

Thanks Sparda, I knew this was the place to come for a reasonable answer (I suspected there was no universal solution *sigh*)

[digip]

look up sym links or soft links. Its similar to windows shortcuts, but you can set up a command to point to a specidic path and program to run from. I'm not really sure about the syntax on creating them, but linux does this for a lot of things that are transparent to the user, such as stuff you see in the gui menu shortcuts, or when you type a programs name into the console without changing to its path to start it from anywhere.

[IOSys]

look up sym links or soft links. Its similar to windows shortcuts

No, "shortcuts" are "similar" to sym-links. As usual microsoft has stolen somebody else's "IP"

and obfuscated it's correct name to destroy the evidence ..

[Sparda]

No, "shortcuts" are "similar" to sym-links. As usual microsoft has stolen somebody else's "IP"

and obfuscated it's correct name to destroy the evidence ..

Shortcuts aren't symbolic links. A symbolic link is a pointer in the file system that points to a directory or file else where in the file system, thus allowing a file or a directory to be in many places in the file system while only taking up the space of one copy of it's contents.

A shortcut or application launcher is a file that a GUI shell (e.g. explorer, Gnome, KDE) interprets and uses to launch another program.

[VaKo]

No, "shortcuts" are "similar" to sym-links. As usual microsoft has stolen somebody else's "IP"

and obfuscated it's correct name to destroy the evidence ..

No the windows equivalent for a linux symlink is a ntfs symlink. Nothing to do with stolen IP dipshit, its part of the POSIX standard and was being used in the 70's, well before Linux ripped off UNIX.