title: Visual Studio not Copying Directory of Linked Files
body: <p>A common practice when staging unmanaged libraries or resources is to add those resources as links to the project and set them to copy to the output directory.</p>
  
  <p>As of Visual Studio 2013, this is handled quite well and even if they are referenced Library <code>Foo</code> which is then consumed by Application <code>Bar</code>, they will end up in <code>Bar</code>'s output directory.</p>
  
  <p>The same doesn't appear to be true for directories of files though.</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/tFtbP.png" alt="Referenced file in library"></p>
  
  <p>In this case, my application appears to only copy this directory of files to the output directory on <strong>rebuild</strong> only. Then inevitably I'll do a couple <strong>build</strong> actions and I'll notice the <code>Libs</code> directory is empty again. Then do a <strong>Rebuild</strong> and <code>cef.pak</code> is back.</p>
  
  <p>My solution to this was to employ a <em>Build Step</em> to copy the <code>Libs</code> directory manually to the output directory. Though I cannot find the proper macro to generically express that even though this build step is part of <code>Foo</code>, I want the files copied to the <code>Bar</code>'s (e.g. <em>StartUp Project</em> in VS terms) output directory.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update</strong></p>
  
  <p>Thank you everyone for the great answers and testing this. I should clarify that I still see this issue when there is an extra level of library in between. That is to say Application <code>Bar</code> referencing library <code>Foo</code> which references library <code>Other</code> which is the one w/ these linked files. In that case, when <code>Other</code>'s linked files are set to copy to output directory, they seem to only make it on rebuilds. My solution to this is less than ideal which is to have <code>Foo</code> reference <code>Other</code> directly.</p>