And in the process of showing Wayne Vista and geeking out some more, I noticed that in DOS the hidden folders that can’t be accessed and are in some cases obviously for backward compatibility are labeled [JUNCTION] instead of [DIR]. They are NTFS junction points, which act like folders (or files) but are pointers to other folders (or files). Also, I had set Explorer to show hidden files and folders, but for some reason that didn’t cascade to the user profile folder, so explicitly turning that on made the hidden stuff visible even from Vista in Explorer.

There is a switch for DIR that shows just junctions, so using /AL and /S redirected to a text file with > will give you a list of all of them on the machine.

There’s also a DOS command, MKLINK, for creating junctions. Who knew.

It’s NTFS security that makes the junctions inaccessible. They don’t need to be; they’re shortcuts to something you can get at elsewhere.

Very cool.