{"id":4220,"date":"2013-02-03T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-03T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/heyscriptingguy\/2013\/02\/03\/weekend-scripter-create-a-sendto-notepad-shortcut\/"},"modified":"2013-02-03T00:01:00","modified_gmt":"2013-02-03T00:01:00","slug":"weekend-scripter-create-a-sendto-notepad-shortcut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/weekend-scripter-create-a-sendto-notepad-shortcut\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Scripter: Create a SendTo Notepad Shortcut"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary:<\/strong> Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, talks about using Windows PowerShell to create a SendTo Notepad shortcut.<\/span><\/p>\n

Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, is here. I absolutely love using Windows 8. To me, it is the best operating system we have ever released at Microsoft. I am especially proud that some of the Help articles I wrote are actually included with Windows PowerShell Help—it is so cool!<\/p>\n

Anyway, one of my favorite things to do is to have a shortcut to Notepad in the SendTo<\/strong> special folder. This way, I can open and look at a lot of things without having to change file associations. I simply right-click, and select Notepad<\/strong> from the SendTo<\/strong> menu. In Windows 8, this is not a default location.<\/p>\n

In the following image, I right-click the CreatePoshOrgPro<\/strong>… script, and point to Send to<\/strong>, but Notepad.exe is not listed as a default location to send items.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

Finding the SendTo folder<\/h2>\n

Ok, so I know that SendTo<\/strong> is a special folder. I guess I can open my user profile folder, find the SendTo<\/strong> folder and create a shortcut to Notepad there—I have done this literally dozens of times over the past few years. But when I attempt to do this, I get access denied. On closer inspection, the SendTo<\/strong> folder is not a real folder, but it redirects to another location.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

Hmm … So I squirrel around trying to find where we hid the SendTo<\/strong> folder, and then I was reading over the text of my new Windows PowerShell 3.0 Step by Step<\/a> book by Microsoft Press, and I ran across the section where I talked about using the old-fashioned WshShell object<\/a>. It dawned on me that I could use this object to completely solve my problem. To begin with, the WshShell<\/strong> object is a COM<\/strong> object, so I need to create an instance of the object by using New-Object<\/strong>. I store the returned COM<\/strong> object in the $wshshell<\/strong> variable, as shown here.<\/p>\n

$wshshell = New-Object -com wscript.shell<\/p>\n

When I call the SpecialFolders<\/strong> property, I receive a listing of all the special folders about which the object knows. Here is the syntax I use.<\/p>\n

$wshshell.SpecialFolders<\/p>\n

The command and the output from the command are shown in the following image.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

It is common that many COM<\/strong> objects have an item<\/strong> <\/em>method. I decide to see if the SpecialFolders<\/strong> collection has one … if it does, I will feed it the specific SendTo<\/strong> <\/em>folder. As shown here, the command works great.<\/p>\n

11:08 C:\\> $wshshell.SpecialFolders.Item(“sendto”)<\/p>\n

C:\\Users\\ed.IAMMRED\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Windows\\SendTo<\/p>\n

So I have the path to the SendTo folder …<\/h2>\n

I paste the path from the $wshshell.SpecialFolders.Item(“sendto”) command to the Windows Explorer path bar, and sure enough the SendTo<\/strong> folder opens. While I am there, I decide to delete a few things I never use.<\/p>\n

I could go ahead and create a new shortcut here, but, dude, that would be like using the GUI and would be the first step to becoming a button monkey … somehow I cannot see myself doing that.<\/p>\n

The SendTo<\/strong> folder is shown in the following image.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

Hey, I bet I can script it …<\/h2>\n

Well, it did not take much time to knock off a quick script. The first thing I need to do is to create the WshShell<\/strong> object and get the path to the SendTo<\/strong> folder—I had already written that code.<\/p>\n

$wshshell = New-Object -com wscript.shell<\/p>\n

$path = $wshshell.SpecialFolders.Item(“sendto”)<\/p>\n

Next, I need to create a path to use for the shortcut. I like to use Join-Path<\/strong> to create paths because it reduces possible concatenation errors.<\/p>\n

$shortcutPath = Join-Path -Path $path -ChildPath “Notepad.lnk”<\/p>\n

Now, I need to call the CreateShort<\/strong> method and pass the path for the shortcut. I have to store the returned object, because I need to specify a couple of properties. I put the object in the $shortcut<\/strong> variable.<\/p>\n

$shortcut = $wshshell.CreateShortcut($shortcutPath)<\/p>\n

Now, I need to specify the target—because Notepad is a well-known application I can avoid specifying the full path to the file. The description is not a requirement, but I like to fill out descriptions when they are available.<\/p>\n

$shortcut.TargetPath = “Notepad.exe”<\/p>\n

$shortcut.Description = “Created by Powershell 3.0”<\/p>\n

Finally, I need to save my work and create the shortcut.<\/p>\n

$shortcut.Save()<\/p>\n

I mouse over to the SendTo<\/strong> folder, and cool it worked!<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

CreateNotePadShortCutInSendTo.ps1<\/p>\n

$wshshell = New-Object -com wscript.shell<\/p>\n

$path = $wshshell.SpecialFolders.Item(“sendto”)<\/p>\n

$shortcutPath = Join-Path -Path $path -ChildPath “Notepad.lnk”<\/p>\n

$shortcut = $wshshell.CreateShortcut($shortcutPath)<\/p>\n

$shortcut.TargetPath = “Notepad.exe”<\/p>\n

$shortcut.Description = “Created by Powershell 3.0”<\/p>\n

$shortcut.Save()<\/p>\n

I uploaded the complete CreateNotePadShortCutInSendTo.ps1 script<\/a> to the Scripting Guys Script Repository to make it easy for you to use the code.<\/p>\n

I invite you to follow me on Twitter<\/a> and Facebook<\/a>. If you have any questions, send email to me at scripter@microsoft.com<\/a>, or post your questions on the Official Scripting Guys Forum<\/a>. See you tomorrow. Until then, peace.<\/p>\n

Ed Wilson, Microsoft Scripting Guy<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summary: Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, talks about using Windows PowerShell to create a SendTo Notepad shortcut. Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, is here. I absolutely love using Windows 8. To me, it is the best operating system we have ever released at Microsoft. I am especially proud that some of the Help articles I wrote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":596,"featured_media":87096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16,3,94,61,45],"class_list":["post-4220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripting","tag-desktop-management","tag-scripting-guy","tag-special-folders","tag-weekend-scripter","tag-windows-powershell"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Summary: Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, talks about using Windows PowerShell to create a SendTo Notepad shortcut. Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, is here. I absolutely love using Windows 8. To me, it is the best operating system we have ever released at Microsoft. I am especially proud that some of the Help articles I wrote […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/596"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}