how to create several shortcuts at the same time for all .exe files in a directory using powershell

Question

Hi I want to create several shortcuts at same time using powershel and something like this

Get-ChildItem -Path D:\something\ -Include *.exe -File -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

get the results and generate shortcuts(.lnk files) for all .exe files

(.exe is just one example of file type)

Can u help me? thx

Answer 1

To create shortcuts of all your .exe files in a directory, you can do the following:

• Create Windows Script host COM object to create shortcuts. You can have a look at Creating COM Objects with New-Object from MSDN for more information.
• Get all .exe files in a directory. Similar to what you have done already with Get-ChildItem.
• Iterate each of these files. Can use foreach or Foreach-Object here.
• Extract BaseName from files. This means getting test from test.exe. We need this to make the shortcut file.
• Create shortcut from path. This path is just the destination path + filename + .lnk extension. We can use Join-Path here to make this path.
• Set target path of shortcut to the executable and save shortcut.

Demonstration:

$sourcePath = "C:\path\to\shortcuts"
$destinationPath = "C:\path\to\destination"

# Create COM Object for creating shortcuts
$wshShell = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell

# Get all .exe files from source directory
$exeFiles = Get-ChildItem -Path $sourcePath -Filter *.exe -Recurse

# Go through each file
foreach ($file in $exeFiles)
{
    # Get executable filename
    $basename = $file.BaseName

    # Create shortcut path to save to
    $shortcutPath = Join-Path -Path $destinationPath -ChildPath ($basename + ".lnk")

    # Create shortcut
    $shortcut = $wshShell.CreateShortcut($shortcutPath)

    # Set target path of shortcut to executable
    $shortcut.TargetPath = $file.FullName

    # Finally save the shortcut to the path
    $shortcut.Save()
}