All you advanced *nix users must have at one point in your life used symbolic links to maintain relationships between folders. But I’ve always found it sad that Windows couldn’t do the same.
From Windows Vista onwards, now you can do this from the Command Prompt! The command required to do this is mklink. You will need administrative privileges to do this, so remember to run your cmd.exe in administrator mode.
This is the description of mklink from Windows 7:
> mklink /?
Creates a symbolic link.
MKLINK [[/D] | [/H] | [/J]] Link Target
/D Creates a directory symbolic link. Default is a file symbolic link.
/H Creates a hard link instead of a symbolic link.
/J Creates a Directory Junction.
Link specifies the new symbolic link name.
Target specifies the path (relative or absolute) that the new link refers to.
Note from the description that you need to differentiate files and folders as different types of symbolic links in Windows. This is probably because the Windows file systems treat directories differently from files, while in *nix systems directories are also considered as files.
/D and /J should be used on directories. To the best of my abilities, I couldn’t differentiate these 2 options, except that Junction points cannot be built on remote directories (that’s kind of a weaker version of /D isn’t it? So why make 2 toggles..).
/H are hard links, but they are only allowed for files, not directories.
Finally, as you should expect, deleting a symlink or hard link does not delete the original file or folder. Deleting the original file does not delete the hard-linked copy of the file.