ValveSoftware
Steam & Valve apps not handling symlinks
Your system information
- Steam client version: 4/16/19 at 21:10:43
- Distribution: Arch
- Opted into Steam client beta?: Yes
- Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:
As the title states, Steam and other Valve developed software such as Garry's mod does not seem to properly handle symbolic links (or bind-mounts, or NTFS junctions). Previously reported by myself on 8/23/18 via Steam Client Beta discussions page. Seems to also have been reported back in 2016, yet still remains unfixed! (Get it together Valve!)
Steps for reproducing this issue:
- Find directory containing files that need to be referenced (e.g. Mod in development, Steam skin git repo clone)
- Make symbolic link via method of your choice
- Steam fails to recognize files despite being recognized by OS
Can confirm that this is a thing.
This is especially annoying when dealing with Source mods.
Related (but not sure if it should be a new issue): I tried to install some compatibility tools in /usr/share/steam/compatibilitytools.d/ in preparation of the changes described in https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/6310#issuecomment-511630263 and then symlinked to the tools there from ~/.local/share/Steam/compatibilitytools.d/… but Steam doesn’t recognise these, presumably because they’re not proper directories but "just" symlinks.
@Plagman What do you think of this? Would it be insurmountable to get the Steam client to handle symlinks properly?
Symlinks are especially useful since steam on linux has a nasty habit of clearing the steam skin's folder every update, not to mention makes updating skins a world easier
This issue also affects the main Steam client: when you open the file browser to add files to a support ticket, symbolic links to files or directories do not appear in the list, even when the drop-down filter is set to "Show all file types". It seems trivially easy to fix so it's surprising that this ticket has been open for three years.
Bumped against this issue. If steam was open source, it would be fixed in minutes so c'mon Valve.
Just ran into this while installing the Adwaita skin on Fedora 37. Thought I would be clever and just symlink into the git repo checkout but it refused to show up in the list until I just copied it into the skins dir.
