Detect Symlink using Python 2.x on Windows

June 20, 2013

Just a quick one today, spent today automating the creation of a VS project for the product I’m working on (which uses a custom build system) and found myself needing to detect if a directory is a symlink on Windows. Python does provide a function os.path.islink(dirPath) but annoyingly on Python 2.x this always returns false for Windows symlinks. Great!

So here’s a working version of the function that I put together using ctypes:

import os, ctypes
def IsSymlink(path):
    FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT = 0x0400

    if os.path.isdir(path) and \
        (ctypes.windll.kernel32.GetFileAttributesW(unicode(path)) & FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT):
    return True
    else:
    return False

Hopefully that saves someone the hassle of finding how to do this

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