I frequently want to share Windows network paths to files with other folks on my team via email or chat. We have a lot of mapped drives here, both ones we set up ourselves and ones set up by our IT overlords. What I'd like to be able to do is to copy the full real path (not the drive letter) from Windows Explorer to send to folks.
Example: I have a file in my "Q:" drive, \\cartman\users\emueller, and I want to send a link to the file foo.doc therein to coworkers. When I copy the file path (shift+right click, "copy as path") it gets the file name "Q:\foo.doc" in the clipboard. This is unhelpful to others, who would need to see \\cartman\users\emueller\foo.doc to be able to consume the link.
In Explorer it clearly knows the full path – in the address bar I see "Computer -> emueller (\\cartman\users) (Q:) ->". Is there a way to say "hey man copy that path as text with the \\cartman\users\emueller not the Q: in it?"
I know I could just set up mapped network locations instead of the mapped drives for the ones that I set up personally and avoid this problem, but most of the mapped drives like the "users" share come from our corporate IT policy and can't be overridden. I could just make a separate network location and then ignore my Q: drive but that's inconvenient (and they do it so they can move accounts across servers). Sure my emailed path might eventually break because I'm losing the drive letter indirection but that's OK with me.
Best Answer
I had exactly the same problem -- not everyone had the same mapped drives as me, or mapped to the same letters.
After much searching I found a context menu extension named Path Copy Copy on GitHub (https://pathcopycopy.github.io/) which is an extended version of a similar, older extension (called Pathcopy) has quite a few options for copying paths as text, including one for UNC paths -- example of the options available are shown below:
You can also choose to show only one or two lines on the base context menu, for example you can have two lines, Copy Long Path, and Copy Long UNC Path. It's great for emailing users in your company who have access to a network path, and if they have the same network mapping as you, you can choose the former, otherwise you can use the latter.
Update: As of version 12.0, a new "portable" installer is available on the above site, which installs only for the current user into the
AppData\Localfolder. I've not tried this, but it could be solution for those who are prohibited from installing normally.