Working with Shortcuts in Windows PowerShell

 Executive Summary:

The Get-Shortcut.ps1 script can be used to transform shortcut files into shortcut objects. You can then use the shortcut objects to perform shortcut-related tasks in Windows PowerShell. Some of these shortcut tasks include exporting a user’s Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) Favorites and finding stale shortcuts.

Shortcuts can be found everywhere in Windows, and checking or fixing them occasionally crops up as an administrative task. For years, scripters have used the Windows Script Host (WSH) WshShortcut object to work with shortcuts. It turns out that this same object, packaged appropriately for use in Windows PowerShell, can work with native WSH tools to perform shortcut tasks and can even make some odd and unexpected tasks quite easy to perform. I'm going to demonstrate how you can use the PowerShell script, Get-Shortcut.ps1, to turn shortcut files into WSH shortcut objects, and then discuss how you can use the shortcut objects to accomplish various tasks such as finding paths to documents you’ve recently used and determining whether shortcuts are stale.

Using Get-Shortcut to Present Shortcut Files as Shortcut Objects
First, download the Get-Shortcut.ps1 script, shown in Listing 1, by clicking the Download the Code Here button at the top of the article page. Then, use the Get-ChildItem cmdlet to pipe paths to one or more shortcut files into the script. Each shortcut name must end in either .lnk (for a shortcut to a Windows file) or .url (for a shortcut to a Web site). If the shortcut name doesn't have one these extensions, the WScript.Shell COM object handling the shortcuts rejects it, and you get an error for that item. . . .