Windows Hard Link |link| -

mklink /H "C:\LegacyApp\config.ini" "D:\SharedConfig\config.ini" Now the legacy app and your modern tool share the same config. When using WSL, files stored in \\wsl$\ are actually on a virtual filesystem. Hard links don't work across the Linux/Windows boundary, but within a Windows NTFS drive, hard links are fully supported. Useful for deduplicating build artifacts between WSL and native Windows tools. Critical Limitations and Dangers ❌ No Directories Windows explicitly blocks creating hard links to directories (NTFS supports them, but Windows disables it to prevent infinite recursion and other filesystem nightmares).

This isn't a shortcut, and it's not a copy. It's something far more powerful—and far more confusing if you don't understand how it works. windows hard link

In this guide, you'll learn exactly what hard links are, how to create them, when to use them, and the critical pitfalls to avoid. A hard link is an additional directory entry that points directly to the same underlying file data on disk. mklink /H "C:\LegacyApp\config

mklink /H "ProjectA\windows.iso" "MasterISOs\windows.iso" mklink /H "ProjectB\windows.iso" "MasterISOs\windows.iso" mklink /H "ProjectC\windows.iso" "MasterISOs\windows.iso" Total disk usage: size of one ISO. Want to keep a "snapshot" of a file before making changes, but don't want to double disk space? Useful for deduplicating build artifacts between WSL and

fsutil hardlink list "link.txt" Or in PowerShell:

Every normal file you create is actually a hard link already—it's just that there's only one link to that data. When you create a second hard link, you're telling Windows: "This data should also appear at this other path."