A widelink directive provides an enhanced level of indirection with respect to a resource, such as a unit of storage, attached to a destination, such as a storage system. The widelink has a scope of indirection that is "wider" than a conventional symbolic link ("symlink"). The novel widelink directive is similar to the distributed file system (DFS) facility that allows DFS-enabled common internet file system clients to resolve uniform naming convention paths to locations that may or may not be on an original storage system, such as a multi-protocol filer, or original protocol server of the filer. By taking advantage of clients that support the DFS facility, the widelink directive is quite flexible in that it can be used to resolve symlinks that "leave" a share.