[MrZipf]

Well, this is cool. Kudos to the folks that made this happen.

It was always a tragedy that the Windows Shell team insisted on creating their own "Shortcut" mechanism and not shaping the existing FS team symlinks to give a unified mechanism. It used to be a big ask to get teams to work with each other.

Could this be ye oldest piece of functionality to arrive in Windows yet? We also had ANSI sequences at the cmd prompt this year. And native ISO mounting in 2011. But non-admin symlinks go back way further. Cool.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Existing FS symlinks? Did FAT support them? .lnk came about in Windows 95.

[stuaxo]

I think the original shortcuts come from pretty early windows systems (.lnk files may have been around 95, but .pif files seem basically equivalent and existed by 3, but probably earlier).

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Windows has multiple forms of shortcut. .PIF is for running DOS applications with a particularly configured environment. .LNK is for shortcuts to files, folders, and applications. .URL is for links to websites or other URLs (Steam uses this, interestingly).