Symlinks on windows?

Question

Does anyone know of a way to make/read symbolic links across versions of win32 from Python? Ideally there should be a minimum amount of platform specific code, as I need my

Answer 1

Juntalis's code does not handle Unicode so I modified it to use ctypes and also simplified it using struct. I've also consulted the code from Using a struct as a function argument with the python ctypes module

import os, ctypes, struct
from ctypes import windll, wintypes

FSCTL_GET_REPARSE_POINT = 0x900a8

FILE_ATTRIBUTE_READONLY      = 0x0001
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_HIDDEN        = 0x0002
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY     = 0x0010
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL        = 0x0080
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT = 0x0400


GENERIC_READ  = 0x80000000
GENERIC_WRITE = 0x40000000
OPEN_EXISTING = 3
FILE_READ_ATTRIBUTES = 0x80
FILE_FLAG_OPEN_REPARSE_POINT = 0x00200000
INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE = wintypes.HANDLE(-1).value

INVALID_FILE_ATTRIBUTES = 0xFFFFFFFF

FILE_FLAG_OPEN_REPARSE_POINT = 2097152
FILE_FLAG_BACKUP_SEMANTICS = 33554432
# FILE_FLAG_OPEN_REPARSE_POINT | FILE_FLAG_BACKUP_SEMANTI
FILE_FLAG_REPARSE_BACKUP = 35651584


GetFileAttributes = windll.kernel32.GetFileAttributesW
_CreateFileW = windll.kernel32.CreateFileW
_DevIoCtl = windll.kernel32.DeviceIoControl
_DevIoCtl.argtypes = [
    wintypes.HANDLE, #HANDLE hDevice
    wintypes.DWORD, #DWORD dwIoControlCode
    wintypes.LPVOID, #LPVOID lpInBuffer
    wintypes.DWORD, #DWORD nInBufferSize
    wintypes.LPVOID, #LPVOID lpOutBuffer
    wintypes.DWORD, #DWORD nOutBufferSize
    ctypes.POINTER(wintypes.DWORD), #LPDWORD lpBytesReturned
    wintypes.LPVOID] #LPOVERLAPPED lpOverlapped
_DevIoCtl.restype = wintypes.BOOL


def islink(path):
    assert os.path.isdir(path), path
    if GetFileAttributes(path) & FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT:
        return True
    else:
        return False


def DeviceIoControl(hDevice, ioControlCode, input, output):
    # DeviceIoControl Function
    # http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363216(v=vs.85).aspx
    if input:
        input_size = len(input)
    else:
        input_size = 0
    if isinstance(output, int):
        output = ctypes.create_string_buffer(output)
    output_size = len(output)
    assert isinstance(output, ctypes.Array)
    bytesReturned = wintypes.DWORD()
    status = _DevIoCtl(hDevice, ioControlCode, input,
                       input_size, output, output_size, bytesReturned, None)
    print "status(%d)" % status
    if status != 0:
        return output[:bytesReturned.value]
    else:
        return None


def CreateFile(path, access, sharemode, creation, flags):
    return _CreateFileW(path, access, sharemode, None, creation, flags, None)


SymbolicLinkReparseFormat = "LHHHHHHL"
SymbolicLinkReparseSize = struct.calcsize(SymbolicLinkReparseFormat);

def readlink(path):
    """ Windows readlink implementation. """
    # This wouldn't return true if the file didn't exist, as far as I know.
    assert islink(path)
    assert type(path) == unicode

    # Open the file correctly depending on the string type.
    hfile = CreateFile(path, GENERIC_READ, 0, OPEN_EXISTING,
                       FILE_FLAG_REPARSE_BACKUP)
    # MAXIMUM_REPARSE_DATA_BUFFER_SIZE = 16384 = (16*1024)
    buffer = DeviceIoControl(hfile, FSCTL_GET_REPARSE_POINT, None, 16384)
    CloseHandle(hfile)

    # Minimum possible length (assuming length of the target is bigger than 0)
    if not buffer or len(buffer) < 9:
        return None

    # Parse and return our result.
    # typedef struct _REPARSE_DATA_BUFFER {
    #   ULONG  ReparseTag;
    #   USHORT ReparseDataLength;
    #   USHORT Reserved;
    #   union {
    #       struct {
    #           USHORT SubstituteNameOffset;
    #           USHORT SubstituteNameLength;
    #           USHORT PrintNameOffset;
    #           USHORT PrintNameLength;
    #           ULONG Flags;
    #           WCHAR PathBuffer[1];
    #       } SymbolicLinkReparseBuffer;
    #       struct {
    #           USHORT SubstituteNameOffset;
    #           USHORT SubstituteNameLength;
    #           USHORT PrintNameOffset;
    #           USHORT PrintNameLength;
    #           WCHAR PathBuffer[1];
    #       } MountPointReparseBuffer;
    #       struct {
    #           UCHAR  DataBuffer[1];
    #       } GenericReparseBuffer;
    #   } DUMMYUNIONNAME;
    # } REPARSE_DATA_BUFFER, *PREPARSE_DATA_BUFFER;

    # Only handle SymbolicLinkReparseBuffer
    (tag, dataLength, reserver, SubstituteNameOffset, SubstituteNameLength,
     PrintNameOffset, PrintNameLength,
     Flags) = struct.unpack(SymbolicLinkReparseFormat,
                            buffer[:SymbolicLinkReparseSize])
    print tag, dataLength, reserver, SubstituteNameOffset, SubstituteNameLength
    start = SubstituteNameOffset + SymbolicLinkReparseSize
    actualPath = buffer[start : start + SubstituteNameLength].decode("utf-16")
    # This utf-16 string is null terminated
    index = actualPath.find(u"\0")
    assert index > 0
    if index > 0:
        actualPath = actualPath[:index]
    if actualPath.startswith(u"?\\"):
        return actualPath[2:]
    else:
        return actualPath