Failed to enable symbolic links for mysql

Question

I am using the Mysql server version: 10.1.21-MariaDB on Windows 7, and when I run the flollowing command SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'have_symlink'; , I get:

 +---------------+-------+ | Variable_name | Value | +---------------+-------+ | have_symlink | NO | +---------------+-------+ 

So, I want to enable them. What have i tried?

• running: mysql --symbolic-links gives the following error:
  mysql: unknown option '--symbolic-links'
• I was looking for a location where a configuration file might be present, so I searched for my.cnf and my.ini in the following places: %WINDIR%\my.ini %WINDIR%\my.cnf \my.ini \my.cnf %APPDIR%\mysql\my.ini %APPDIR%\mysql\my.cnf %APPDIR%\mysql\data\my.ini %APPDIR%\mysql\data\my.cnf To create a file, I created the following parameter file that will be used when starting my.cnf server with the following command:
  [mysqld]
symbolic-links
• I made sure on Windows :

Local and local symbolic links are allowed.
Local or remote symbolic links are included.

So what am I doing wrong and how to make the have_symlink variable have the value yes ??

EDIT: I restarted the server after changing my.cnf file, but without success

EDIT 2: for the first error mentioned, this is because --symbolic-link is a server and not a client version, so I would type mysqld --symbolic-links and save me from looking for any parameter file, because the parameters specified command line take precedence.

Answer 1

You need to do two things:

• Place symbolic-links=1 in the configuration file ( .cnf ) under [mysqld] .
• Restart the MySQL server.

After the restart, the have_symlink value should be yes .

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Beware: Disabling symbolic links is recommended to prevent various security risks ( link ).