Ignore symbolic links when downloading

Is it possible to ignore symbolic links to files when downloading "New and updated only"? I would like to skip those files entirely, and not download them at all.

Thank you.

Never mind, I figured it out. I created a custom transfer set, and added the file mask >2K.

After many months of the file mask >4K working, today (using WinSCP 5.19.3), it stopped working. It is downloading the targets of symlinks.

I updated to WinSCP 5.19.4, tried again, and it still keeps downloading symlinks, even with >9K as the mask.

To see if this was a symlink-related issue, or a file mask related issue, I set the file mask to >100K and attempted to download a group of files including symlinks, some <100K files, and some >100K files. WinSCP skipped the <100K file, but did download the 399K symlinked file.

So for whatever reason, even though WinSCP displays "1K" next to all of my symlinks, it still checks the on-disk size of the symlinked file, and downloads it even if the file mask size would prevent the downloading of the symlink-size file.

I believe you are a victim of this change:
https://winscp.net/tracker/1747
Did you update WinSCP recently?

Would turning off "Resolve symbolic links" option help?
https://winscp.net/eng/docs/ui_login_directories

Yes, it appears that an update to WinSCP is what caused this change in behaviour.

Yes, un-checking "resolve symbolic links" does appear to make the file filter work as it did before.

Unfortunately, my normal workflow is to use PuTTY Session Manager, and select "open with WinSCP" when I want to scp to/from servers, and Putty Session Manager uses whatever the default WinSCP settings happen to be (and I would not want to un-check "resolve symbolic links" by default). Putty Session Manager does not use WinSCP's site-specific configuration.

I am now reading about WinSCP's PuTTY integration, and the possibility of using WinSCP as my session manager for PuTTY. The difficulty there would be the exact opposite: getting WinSCP to use the site-specific configuration in PuTTY. According to the Integration With PuTTY page, I can save PuTTY site settings with the same exact name as a WinSCP site, and WinSCP will then instruct PuTTY to open that session, using the configuration saved within PuTTY.

I will experiment with that today.

It looks like this will work. It will require slightly more work to maintain, but it will accomplish what I want to accomplish. I will need to import my current Putty sites into WinSCP, and if I add new sites in either WinSCP or PuTTY, I will need to add a matching site in the other program.

(later...)

Unfortunately, I will still need PuTTY Session Manager to export/import my PuTTY settings between systems, because PuTTY does not have a built-in way to do that. But I won't be using it as a shortcut to open PuTTY and WinSCP sessions anymore: I will be using WinSCP for that. I have run some tests, and it appears to suit my purposes. Thanks!

Note that you can configure PuTTY-specific settings even in WinSCP:
https://winscp.net/eng/docs/ui_login_environment
That may spare you from having to duplicate your sessions in PuTTY.

The main things I want to configure in PuTTY are:

* Default background color
* Window title
* Height and width of the terminal window
* Lines in the scrollback buffer

Aha, it appears I can set that up inside WinSCP. Splendid!

It works! Thank you, Martin.