title: Git symbolic links in Windows
body: <p>Our developers use a mix of Windows and Unix-based OSes. Therefore, symbolic links created on Unix machines become a problem for Windows developers. In Windows (<a href="https://github.com/msysgit/" rel="noreferrer">MSysGit</a>), the symbolic link is converted to a text file with a path to the file it points to. Instead, I'd like to convert the symbolic link into an actual Windows symbolic link.</p>
  <p>The (<strong>updated</strong>) solution I have to this is:</p>
  <ul>
  <li>Write a post-checkout script that will recursively look for &quot;symbolic link&quot; text files.</li>
  <li>Replace them with a Windows symbolic link (using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_links#Command-line_tools" rel="noreferrer">mklink</a>) with the same name and extension as dummy &quot;symbolic link&quot;</li>
  <li>Ignore these Windows symbolic links by adding an entry into file <em>.git/info/exclude</em></li>
  </ul>
  <p>I have not implemented this, but I believe this is a solid approach to this problem.</p>
  <ol>
  <li>What, if any, downsides do you see to this approach?</li>
  <li>Is this post-checkout script even implementable? I.e., can I recursively find out the dummy &quot;symlink&quot; files Git creates?</li>
  </ol>