never seen this; a file & a folder linked together!!?? 1

[dakota81]

I saved off a webpage from Mozilla today, and the weirdest thing happened; there was the .html file & a directory with the images (as is how the webpage was written). However, the .html file & the directory were "linked" together. If I copy & pasted the .html file, the directory would be copy & pasted together as well. If I moved the .html file to another folder, the folder was moved as well.

Now when I went to rename the .html file, Windows popped up with a dialog box stating "If you rename this file, it will no longer belong to the folder 'sponsor_files'." (as that was the particular name of the folder).

What is the deal with this "feature" of Windows? How does it work? How do I avoid it? What the heck is happenning?

 

[steamwiz]

You can't avoid it - this is what XP does

If you want to rename the file/folder you must open the page and save it with a new name.

steam

 

[MorbidObesity]

How can you manipulate? How do you "link" files?

 

[AP81]

The HTML file needs the folder because it contains the pictures, scripts, etc for the HTML page. There is a dependency betweeen the two.

 

[bcastner]

I think the files were streamed. A little known feature of the MS adoption of NTFS was the implementation of ADS (Alternate Data Streams). You can stream a file to another filename, or to a Folder. You can only remove the stream by removing the parent.

This is vaguely similar to an inode in Linux.

http://www.diamondcs.com.au/index.php?page=archive&id=ntfs-streams

Ever wanted the same file with two names but did not want to physical copies of the file? Stream them. There are a lot of tricks you can do with streams, including hide files.

 

[gpalmer711]

There is a way to disable this but it is disabled on a Global scale not just per page saved.

Make sure you have a backup of your registry and then open Regedit.

Find the following Key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

See if a DWORD exists called NoFileFolderConnection if not create one.

Set the value of the DWORD to 1. This disables the linking. If you want the linking to start again change the value to 0.

Restart your computer.

The setting should now be changed.



Greg Palmer

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Any feed back is appreciated.