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I can't figure out how to create shortcuts that don't care where they are mounted. For example, on my flash drive, I want to run CCleaner or Notepad++ in my college classroom. The problem is, a shortcut (at least with default settings) doesn't work reliably because it is tied to the same drive it was created on. Is there a way to do something like in HTML?


Here is where the actual program is: Root\Portable Applications\Program Data\CCleaner\ccleaner.exe

Here is where I want the shortcut to be: Root\Portable Applications\CCleaner.lnk

U3/Portable Apps/etc is not the solution I am looking for

Thank you for your time

Edit: The Versions of Windows will be XP 32 bit, Vista 64 bit, and Vista 32 bit

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3 Answers 3

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You can use mklink if on Vista or later to create symbolic links. They can be pointed to wherever you want. Alternatively a batch file as pointed out by pelms would work as well.

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Hi John, thank you for your reply. When I try to use mklink, I get the error message, "The device does not support symbolic links." After a quick search, mklink isn't for FAT filesystems. If there are no other options, I will switch to NTFS for my thumb drive. Thank you again John for your answer. –  Dan Aug 23 '09 at 7:22
Junctions are not the same as symlinks. Junctions can only point to directories, and work in a different way. Real Unix-like symlinks were added only in Vista. –  grawity Aug 23 '09 at 10:09

Instead of using a shortcut you could create a batch file that uses a root relative path to the exe file.
e.g. for your example

@start "" "\Portable Applications\Program Data\CCleaner\ccleaner.exe"

The batch file should then work from anywhere on the USB drive, whatever the drive letter.

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You can even change the icon if you want. don't know the portability of that. –  Dykam Aug 23 '09 at 17:55
@Dykam. Can you change the icon for a .bat file without using Dan's method..? –  pelms Aug 23 '09 at 19:29

Ok thank you guys for your replies. Here is what I ended up doing for any interested. pelms idea to use a batch file is almost it. (A Very good idea, thank you pelms) What I did was just make an AutoIt script that runs the apps in directories below it. Then I just compiled it with an extracted .ico from each executable file so everything looked pretty. Thanks again John and pelmsd

Run ('Program Data\PDF X-Change\PDFXCview.exe')

That is all the script consists of. Thanks again guys, I have linked the two programs I used if anyone is interested



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