Traverse symlinks - remove "missing files" bug

[Slayer537]

This is a topic that has been mentioned at least twice in the following two posts:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=54345

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=50804

Situation:

I have roughly 200 active torrents on my system, none of which have the files located in the directory that µTorrent looks at. This is so that I can keep my files organized according to my convention, have the content stored on a separate larger "disc" (a RAID), and still seed the content. When using symlinks, µTorrent thinks that there are "missing files".

Workaround:

Stop torrent. Force recheck. "start" torrent while it is rechecking. This will get the torrent to start seeding again; however, it requires the files to be checked first, which takes a very long time for hundreds of torrents, especially since this has to happen each time µTorrent is exited.

How to recreate:

Assuming you have a file titled "my_super_awesome_example.eg" located in the directory "C:\Example" and you wish to create a symlink to the path "C:\Torrents" with the name of "RenamedTorrent.eg" execute the following command is command prompt:

MKLINK "C:\Torrents\RenamedTorrent.eg" "C:\Example\my_super_awesome_example.eg"

Start the torrent and point it to that file. Once it has finished checking, stop it and/or close µTorrent. Start µTorrent and/or play the torrent. You should get some error regarding that there are missing files.

I used to use hardlinks and those worked great; however, I have recently needed to move to a larger storage configuration and as such, symlinks were required. I know that directory symlinks work just fine; however, since many torrents are just single files, this is not a viable solution.

To give you a better idea of the scale I'm talking about - I have close to 2000 symlinks, and most of which are not exclusively directory symlinks. My current estimate on how long it takes to recheck all of my files is roughly 3 hours.

I would greatly appreciate it if you could add support for symlinks to be fully traversed first, such that the torrent will no longer think it has missing files.

[mjb5311]

IMHO, since there is already partial support for symlinks (Force Re-Check works) and presumably symlinks work fine on other OSes, this is not so much a feature request as it is a bug report.

 

Also, it was already reported here (as a feature request, *sigh*):

• Symlink support (Windows Vista)

I suggest directing followups to that thread.