The Old New Thing

How does Explorer deal with recent files that were renamed?

October 8, 2012 Oct 8, 2012 10/8/12

Raymond Chen

Roni wonders how Explorer manages to keep track of files that were moved or renamed. Specifically, "opening a shortcut to a renamed file actually updates the shortcut's destination and opens the renamed file. How is this done? Is it an NTFS feature?" This feature has been around since Windows 95. If the target of a shortcut no longer ...