Hi, this might be a little off-topic (since it involves windows)

1) I mounted a volume using cifs on windows. That volume has a symbolic link (which was created using a solaris client) Is there anyway to know from my windows client that a particular file is actually a symbolic link ??

2) The volume has a sparse file so that the logical size of the file is very big compared to its actual size on disk. However on my windows client, RightClick->Properties shows size of the file same as its size on disk. Is there anyway from my windows client to know that the file is sparse and has holes ?

Any help will be appreciated !! Thanks

Personally I don't think so. CIFS is a Microsoft protocol. Microsoft does not have the notion of symbolic links (Windows shortcuts is closest in concept but it is mostly desktop-oriented and is like other ordinary file and bears no special significance even on MS filesystems). So, it is reasonable that the Unix driver needs to mask this too. The filesystem on Unix will not prevent you from creating links, but the driver needs to interpret it as either following the link, or denying access subject to configuration.

Someone actually contrived an even more innovative question similar to yours before for masking symbolic links as shortcuts:

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba...il/013312.html