windowswinapishortcut

Finding the shortcut a Windows program was invoked from

Is there a way for a Windows program to find out what shortcut (i.e. .lnk file), if any, it was invoked from, so that it can pick up the shortcut's icon?

Solution

  • You can call GetStartupInfo() to fill a STARTUPINFO structure. If the STARTF_TITLEISLINKNAME flag is set, the STARTUPINFO::lpTitle field contains the path to the .lnk file.

    (This was undocumented for a long time. It probably works all the way back to Win95.)