Reading the Target of a Shortcut with Shell32 Interop

From IronPython Cookbook

Adapted from this C# example. (Which took a long time to find...)

Windows shortcut link files (.lnk) are odd creatures. They use a strange binary format documented here (pdf).

You can read them using Shell32 interoperability.

Run tlbimp. See Interop introduction for more information:

tlbimp %SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll /out:Interop.Shell32.dll

Or use ProgID "Shell.Application".

This generates a dll called 'Interop.Shell32.dll'. If we add the directory containing this dll to sys.path, then we can add a reference to it and import from it. Shell32 provides a lot of functionality, we are using ShellClass.

import sys
import clr

sys.path.append(PATH_TO_DIRECTORY_WITH_SHELL32_DLL)
clr.AddReferenceToFile('Interop.Shell32.dll')

from Interop.Shell32 import ShellClass

shell = ShellClass()
folder = shell.NameSpace(r"C:\Temp")
folderItem = folder.ParseName('filename.lnk')

link = folderItem.GetLink
path = link.Path

The code above can be rewritten as a function:

import clr
clr.AddReferenceToFile('Interop.Shell32.dll')
from System.IO import Path
from Interop.Shell32 import ShellClass

def GetLinkTarget(linkFilename):
    shell = ShellClass()
    folder = shell.NameSpace(Path.GetDirectoryName(linkFilename))
    folderItem = folder.ParseName(Path.GetFileName(linkFilename))
    return folderItem.GetLink.Path

The other side of the story is Creating a Shortcut File with WSH Interop.

There's lots in Shell32, functions for launching applications, managing printers and so on. There is an article (C#) on using it for reading ID3 tags from mp3 files here.

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