You used to need admin or something like that. It's only since about 2017 that they are available to normal users by default.

It seems to have been a win 7 innovation. Personally I gave up on it after XP.

This seems to be about junctions not shortcuts (which are at a higher level of abstraction)

though even the docs then advised against them.

Why wouldn't they want users using them?

MS Windows and PHP... yeah I can see the resemblance. They're both crufty old tools that are obsolete for more than a decade but still widely used and talked about.

Heh. Yes they're similar, but on the technical side different in a very important way. It has to do with opening a file from inside another program. If you select a shortcut, the program with treat or as a separate file, so most of the time the action will fail. A link, though, you should end up with the program opening the target of the link. In other words, a shortcut is a file that points at a different file, where a symlink involves she filesystem trickery to accomplish almost the same thing.

That's a horrible, just terrible explanation, though - but I'm pretty sure this is the gist of it.

What would have been a better solution?