[Python-Dev] Updates to PEP 471, the os.scandir() proposal

[Paul Moore]

On 10 July 2014 01:23, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As a Windows user with only a superficial understanding of how
>> symlinks should behave, (...)
>
> FYI Windows also supports symbolic links since Windows Vista. The
> feature is unknown because it is restricted to the administrator
> account. Try the "mklink" command in a terminal (cmd.exe) ;-)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link
>
> ... To be honest, I never created a symlink on Windows. But since it
> is supported, you need to know it to write correctly your Windows
> code.

I know how symlinks *do* behave, and I know how Windows supports them.
What I meant was that, because Windows typically makes little use of
symlinks, I have little or no intuition of what feels natural to
people using an OS where symlinks are common.

As someone (Tim?) pointed out later in the thread,
FindFirstFile/FindNextFile doesn't follow symlinks by default (and nor
do the dirent entries on Unix). So whether or not it's "natural", the
"free" functionality provided by the OS is that of lstat, not that of
stat. Presumably because it's possible to build symlink-following code
on top of non-following code, but not the other way around.

Paul