Win32 Perl Programming: The Standard Extensions, Second Edition

Shortcuts

With the introduction of Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95, the concept of a shortcut was brought to the Win32 platform. A shortcut is a type of alias for a file or directory. You can use a collection of shortcuts that point to your favorite directories and files. These files could be commonly used programs or documents you read or edit often. Creating these shortcuts in a particular directory makes a convenient way to jump to your commonly used programs, files, and directories. This is what Microsoft Office products do when they create the Favorites directory.

A shortcut is like a link in the UNIX world except that it is not processed by the OS directly; instead, it is processed by an application (try accessing a shortcut using an older ...