Secrets of Windows Shortcut Files

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▼ Time Stamps: ▼
0:00 - Intro
0:12 - Not What You Think
1:19 - An Excellent Thing
2:55 - What's Inside a Shortcut?
3:50 - LECmd Tool
5:09 - A Real Useful Example
6:04 - Weird Start Menu Behavior
7:02 - As For The Taskbar
8:52 - Shorcuts in the GodMode Folder
10:19 - All The Other Shell Folders
11:18 - Accessing Shell Folders

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[ThioJoe]

Thanks to Ugreen for sponsoring! Learn more at these links:

[bobknip]

You can create a shortcut to open a folder with a certain file selected:
1. Create a shortcut to the file itself. 2. Open the properties of the shortcut (the .lnk file). 3. Add "explorer.exe /select, " (without quotes) in front of the path to the file. 4. Put the path to the file in "double quotes". 5. Click OK to save the changed shortcut file.
If you were successful, the icon of the shortcut should have changed.
I use this for "more gentle" shortcuts to add to my Windows startup folder. I am reminded to open the file at startup, but can do so when I choose, instead of the file being opened directly. This makes startup faster and less confusing, especially if there are several such manually added startup items.

[stcm]

FYI PowerShell can attach/edit a shortcut with the built-in Wscript Shell's CreateShortcut command. If you pass it the path of an existing shortcut, it gets opened for inspection/editing. I use this often to create useful shortcuts in VMs where I don't have binary clipboard access.

[claudiu]

Random shortcut tip > you can use environment variables in the shortcut path
I have a folder where I store my portable apps. I also have a folder with shortcuts to those apps. I added the shortcut folder to the path, this way I can open the portable apps by typing the name of the shortcut in Run... or in start.
If I need to move the portable folder or copy it on another machine, I don't need to recreate the shortcuts from scratch, all I have to do is to change the Path in one environment variable and all the shortcuts will be updated.

[cheesemanig]

godmode was 90% of all tutorials in 2015 i swear

[Mr-Mhmd]

That explains why I couldn't run some programs when I accidentally deleted the original shortcut on the Desktop and recreated the shortcut with the actual path from Program files. Great video Joe

[lakelimbo]

interestingly, on Linux the more or less equivalent of LNK files are .desktop ones, but afaik they are just an object with the target and params pointing to a program (though I think most programs prefer to use symbolic links, which LNK files sort of are anyway)

[philipspedding]

7:02 There's a much easier work around (with a small trade of). If you create the shortcut and change the icon of the shortcut to something not in the taskbar then you can pin that even if the target program is the same.
I don't know all the mechanism behind it, because I use this to launch FileExplorer in specific folders (actually, I need it to launch a .bat script that launches FE in a given DIR). Hope that helps or at least leads to interesting experimenting

[BNWilliamGaming]

I first figured out what file type shortcuts were when I backed up my entire C drive to Google Drive. I saw my desktop folder had all of my shortcuts in this weird .lnk format. Thank’s for teaching me about them!

[georgeh]

Back in the day, I used OS/2. OS/2 did something I still have not seen any other OS be able to do. In OS/2 when you moved the target file a link was pointing to, OS/2's object model would automatically update the link so that it would never lose track of the target file. In Windows, if the target file got moved, Windows used to show a moving flashlight icon as it searched for the target file. I don't know whether that is still the case. In Linux with the KDE Dolphin file manager, moving the target file will result in a strange behavior where a new zero-length target file will be created where the target file used to be. OS/2 had a very advanced object model.

Update: user YS_Production posted a reply that Windows does now track links in Windows.

[iuhere]

goldmine video for shortcuts guide especially for newer windows versions

[DarkGamerA]

Thio jio always bringing us useful stuff

[rxREDSTONE]

3:26 Please don't ever call file contents "machine code" just because it is a binary file (e.g. not human readable). This is not a file that is readable by the computer, it is a binary format that explorer parses and can be parsed by external tools (example: BinaryReader class in C#). This type of file is a custom format handled by a specific application. When people say "machine code" - that is code that is understandable by the CPU. For instance an exe file does contain machine code because it mostly has various CPU instructions in binary which a modern CPU comprehensively understands and can be interpreted, whereas a lnk file is just a binary format that stores information about a shortcut which is manually read by a program (kind of similar to XML or Json and stuff)

[MarkAJAgi]

Sometimes you may have a program that you don't want to end for a few hours. EG. Uploading a big video to Youtube.
So to close down the computer in a few hours when your not there, I use a shortcut file to shutdown the computer.
Create a few shortcut files, and save them to the desktop.
Name it 'Shutdown in 1 hour', 'Shutdown in 2 hours', ... and put the following code in the files.
-s -f -t 3600 -c "Goodbye Windows. :o("
3600 = 1 hour.
For 2 hours name it 'Shutdown in 2 hours' and edit -t 3600 to -t 7200
To abort shutdown use:
-a -c "Shutdown has been aborted."
For more info type 'shutdown' in a cmd window.

[brockk]

You DO want to change the registry to show .lnk extensions. Malware can disguise itself as a text or image file by simply using a .lnk extension that won't be visible unless you make the change.

[ckingpro]

I learned quite a bit about shortcuts! Good video

[fostena]

9:46 that's the strangest pronunciation of "Canonical" I have ever heard

[JustPyroYT]

I think FlyTech made a more In-Depth video about the insides and workings of lnk files.

[jonnysokkoatduckdotcom]

The people that made these OSes are really smart!

[zigafide]

these are prolly my favorite videos that you make. its so cool to know this much about something that I otherwise would have never looked into at all