title: What FAT32 symlink standard does cygwin and msys2 use?
body: <p>I've noticed that in cygwin and MSYS2 I'm allowed to make symlinks on FAT32 volumes, and these symlinks are visible both in cygwin and MSYS2 interchangeably.  The &quot;links&quot; are not links in the traditional sense, because FAT32 has no concept of that.  Instead they are flat files with a magic header of <code>0x213c73796d6c696e6b3e</code> (ASCII: <code>!&lt;symlink&gt;</code>) followed by a BOM prepended UTF-16 little endian null terminated string providing the relative (or absolute) path to target.</p>
  <pre><code>Z:\link-test&gt; ls -l link.d
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 cygwin cygwin 7 Jan  9 20:59 link.d -&gt; test.d/
  
  Z:\link-test&gt; &lt;link.d xxd -g2 -e
  00000000: 3c21 7973 6c6d 6e69 3e6b feff 0074 0065  !&lt;symlink&gt;..t.e.
  00000010: 0073 0074 002e 0064 002f 0000            s.t...d./...
  
  Z:\link-test&gt; &lt;link.d tail -c +13
  test.d/
  </code></pre>
  <p>So, is this standardized anywhere, and if so, how can I mount a <code>vfat</code> filesystem in linux that honors these pseudo-symlink references?</p>