Similar to junctions, symbolic links take the feature a couple of steps further. While junctions are limited to the NTFS 5.0 system, symbolic links do not share this restriction. Even better, you can link to individual files as opposed to only folders as is the requirement of junctions.

The feature is designed to aid in migration and application compatibility (particularly with UNIX operating systems). They are transparent to users and appear as normal files or directories. As such, you can fake programs and the operating system into using alternate names and references to files and folders with this feature.

By default only members of the administrators group can create links, but you can adjust this via local security policy if you wish:

Secpol.msc > Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Assignment > Create symbolic links

Note: if you make a change here, you’ll need to log out and back in again for the change to take effect. However, you may just want to run your command prompt as administrator to get the job done as to write a file to a system location you will need such permission anyway.
To create a symbolic link, use the mklink command. For example the below command line will create a symbolic link to the windows directory named “win” (note that by default links are created to files so you must specify the /d argument for a directory link)…

mklink /d win c:\windows