What is the difference between NTFS Junction Points and Symbolic Links?

Question

At a high level, the only obvious difference between NTFS Junction Points and Symbolic Links is that Junctions are only able to be directories, while SymLinks are allowed to

Answer 1

The places I find the most useful for the differences:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/junfeng/archive/2006/04/15/576568.aspx

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MoreOnVistaReparsePoints.aspx

Postulate: Symlink is to Junction in Windows as Symlink is to Hardlink in Unix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link#Windows_7_.26_Vista_symbolic_link

Windows 7 and Windows Vista support symbolic links for both files and directories with the command line utility mklink. Unlike junction points, a symbolic link can also point to a file or remote Server Message Block (SMB) network path. Additionally, the NTFS symbolic link implementation provides full support for cross-filesystem links. However, the functionality enabling cross-host symbolic links requires that the remote system also support them, which effectively limits their support to Windows Vista and later Windows operating systems.

http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-advanced/junction-points-and-symbolic-links/

A symbolic link, as created by Windows, is much similar to a directory junction, but unlike a directory junction it can point to a file or a remote network file or directory. The target may be defined as a path relative to the symbolic link position, or an absolute path in the current volume or another one. Also note that symbolic links to files are different from symbolic links to directories and the target must match the definition.