cmd.exefile-shortcutwindows
I have a shortcut to a folder and I want to open it from the Command Prompt. I want the Command Prompt to immediately change to the target location of the shortcut. Instead, if I try to execute the shortcut at the Command Prompt it simply opens the folder in Windows Explorer.
How can I parse a shortcut file (.LNK) from the Command Prompt and switch to the shortcut's target folder?
Create your shortcut and then right click to get the properties dialog and set the "Start in:" property to be your folder.
If you are running the shortcut as an administrator you should add your desired path to the target (instead of "start in"), for example:
%windir%\System32\cmd.exe /k cd c:\crp
or
%windir%\System32\cmd.exe /k pushd c:\crp
because the "start in" value is ignored when running as administrator (all credits go to @barlop for their answer and @T_D for their comment)
It is a bit tricky, because you do not want the background color changing process to intercept any of your console input. You could add the /NOBREAK option to the TIMEOUT command, such that the script never reads stdin, except it still could process a <CTRL-Break> interupt, and ask if you want to terminate the script. The user could respond with Y and terminate the background process, but that could get confusing if the main process also has a running batch script. Which process gets the input?
You can redirect stdin to nul for the background process, but TIMEOUT fails if input is redirected.
I modified your auto-change-text-color.bat to use a PING delay instead of TIMEOUT, thus allowing stdin to be redirected to NUL. I also put one last COLOR command at the end to finish with a more readable color combination.
@echo off
set NUM=0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
for %%x in (%NUM%) do (
for %%y in (%NUM%) do (
color %%x%%y
>nul ping localhost -n 2
)
)
color 07
The following command is used to launch the script in the background with stdin redirected to nul:
start "" /b cmd /c "auto-change-text-color.bat <nul"
The only odd side effect is that the background process still can receive <CTRL-Break>, and it prints out the message Terminate batch job (Y/N)?, but immediately continues without waiting for input. So you can safely start a batch script in the main process, issue <CTRL-Break> and get two Terminate messages, and press Y or N knowing that only the batch script in your main process will respond (terminate or not).
Best Answer
This is a typical X-Y problem. If you want CMD to always open at a specific directory instead of the default, all you need to do is simply change the shortcut's properties as follows:
In Windows 7 the Command Prompt shortcut is typically located in
Start Menu > All Programs > Accessories, so just right-click the shortcut, select Properties and edit the Start in field to your liking.You can also create a batch file named for example d.bat that contains a single line
cd /d c:\wamp\www. Place the batch file somewhere in your path and now all you need to do is open CMD and type d to change to the specific directory. There are many more similar solutions as well.If you are dead set on parsing a shortcut (.LNK) file from the command prompt, save the following as ParseLnk.bat and execute it from the Command Prompt as
ParseLnk <LNK File>: