350667 - Creating shortcuts for files

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[alex]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060713 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060713 Firefox/1.5.0.4

There is no way to create a shortcut/symlink/alias for a file using nsILocalFile (or any other XPCOM as far as i know) in a crossplatform way. For Windows a shortcut can be created as a file (although the information about the format of the file is not very easy available), but the symlinks and aliases as far as i know can't be created like that, and even if they can it means that a developer would have to deal with at least 3 different file formats (i have no idea what are the equivalents for the other OSes and how they are created). It would be much cleaner to have a function like file.createLink(dirToCreateIn,type), where file and dirToCreateIn are nsILocalFile - s, and type is the type of the link - soft or hard (for linux for example, but i hear MS will have similar type of links in Vista). A function like that will be very helpful when creating applications for XULRunner, or extensions working on the filesystem. Like my extension Firefly - it's a file manager and normally a filemanager needs a way to create shortcuts of files.

Reproducible: Always