Cygwin mkshortcut Unicode Windows filename support

Submitted by tomo on September 8, 2010 - 1:03am

Cygwin comes with utilities for dealing with Windows-style shortcut files. readshortcut will output the file path that a shortcut links to (and more) and mkshortcut can create Windows shortcuts. However, there is currently one limitation. Windows filenames are in Unicode and have certain other limitations that Posix filenames do or don't have. The current Cygwin mkshortcut doesn't deal with such Unicode filenames. However, you can patch it so that it does.

1. Get source for all Cygwin utils at: http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/cygutils.htm

2. You may need to install src packages for the following:
libintl2
libiconv2
popt

3. The original patch from http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg23048.html no longer applies cleanly so get the patch or the whole mkshortcut.c file attached here.

4. ./configure && make

And now you should have a mkshortcut that supports Windows filenames!

Attachments: 
text/x-diff icon
mkshortcut.patch
text/x-c++src icon
mkshortcut.c
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