Version 6 of Windows shell links

Can Tcl manage Windows "shell links" [L1 ]? Certainly; there are at least six ways:

Matt Newman's tlink32 [L2 ]
by way of DDE, as David Gravereaux exemplifies:

      dde execute progman progman "" "\[CreateGroup(Bogus)\]"
      dde execute progman progman "" \
            "\[AddItem(notepad.exe,BogusPadLink)\]"
      dde execute progman progman "" "\[ShowGroup(Bogus,0)\]"
      dde execute progman progman "" "\[ShowGroup(Bogus,1)\]"
      dde execute progman progman "" "\[DeleteItem(BogusPadLink)\]"
      dde execute progman progman "" "\[DeleteGroup(Bogus)\]"

Steve Cassidy wraps this DDE approach in a progman.tcl [L3 ] package designed "package to allow creation of program groups and shortcuts in the start menu on Windows 9x/NT"
Bill Schongar's WISE hack [L4 ]
freeWrap includes "shell link" functionality comparable to tlink32's.
[...]

RS tried reading such links, or "shortcuts", in a simpler, and pure-Tcl way. If you look at .lnk files in hexdump, you notice that they contain the string of what they link to, among other things. So I tried just to split on NUL bytes and see whether a snippet is a valid absolute path:

 proc readlnk {lnk} {
   set res ""
   set fp [open $lnk]
   foreach snip [split [read $fp] \x00] {
        if {[regexp {[A-Z]:\\} $snip] && [file exists $snip]} {
           lappend res $snip
        }
   }
   close $fp
   join $res
 }

This is highly experimental, but it worked on the few examples I tried - please correct me if you know better! Simple links to directories and files work. Links that contain an executable invocation with arguments and icon, are a funny mix of ASCII and Unicode, so splitting on 0 is not a good idea there, and the above code does not work.

See also Symbolic links in Windows/CE

 package require tcom
 set sh [::tcom::ref createobject "WScript.Shell"]
 set lnk [$sh CreateShortcut {D:\WORK\Acrobat.lnk}]
 $lnk TargetPath {"D:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 4.0\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe"}
 $lnk WorkingDirectory {D:\WORK}
 $lnk Arguments Tutorial.pdf
 $lnk Save