A while ago we taught you how to create symbolic links in Windows 7 . Now let’s say you created so many that you don’t remember all the locations of your symbolic links, how would you find and view all of them?
Shortcut vs. Symbolic Link vs. Junction
- Shortcut = Soft link saved on the hard drive
- Symbolic Link = Similar to shortcut but registered as NTFS link
- Junction = Hard link For Directories
I explained the difference between soft links and hard links previously: Hard links can be defined as “real” links to a file. Windows will treat that link as if it was the original file or directory
Find All Symbolic Links / Junctions
So, to find all symbolic links and junction points you can use the tool NTFSLinksView. Head over to http://www.nirsoft.net/ to download the symbolic link viewer.
If you have a non-English Windows versions, some links (junction points) are created by Windows 7. For example all folders in C:\Users\yourusername are actually pointing to the English folders AppData\Roaming, Documents, Recent, Start Menu and whatever else there it.
The problem with the program is that you have to go specific paths to actually see the links, it will not list all of them automatically. So, let’s say you have a symbolic link in C:\ then you’d have change to that path. Then double-click on the folder/file to see when the symbolic link was created:
If you know any other tool that can find all links on your hard drive, feel free to post it below.