Re: netrw and symbolic links

ThomasD wrote:
> Hi
>
> I'm just discovering Vim's ability to edit files that reside on a
> remote machine. I wish to run gVim on my Wndows machine, and the files
> that are locted on a linux machine are accesible by ftp.
>
> Everything was working fine, and I was browsing away on the remote
> machine, when I tried to open a symbolic link. and the browser
> returned me to my remote home directory. Maybe I should have noticed
> that the file in question was marked as a directory in the browser.
>
> When searching the documentation it seems that the issue has been
> dealt with, so I'm at a loss.
>
> Can anyone point out a solution to editing files pointed to by a
> symbolic link?
>
> BTW, I'm using gVim 7.3.
>
The symbolic links mentioned in the documentation (history) refer to
local symbolic links.

Remote symbolic links are more problematic -- when is the remote link
pointing to a directory versus pointing to a file? The ftp listing
itself isn't clear.

Remote directories are probed with directory listing commands; remote
files are downloaded and made available for local editing, so clearly
these two operations are quite different. Netrw chooses to treat things
as files unless there's a trailing "/", which, for symbolically linked
directories, isn't there, so netrw ends up treating symbolically linked
directories as files.

One idea would be to always try to change directory and to intercept the
occasional error to require treating it as a file. Unfortunately this
means that several transfer requests are being made, which in turn means
multiple requests for passwords -- which I'm trying to minimize.

Regards,
Chip Campbell

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