Can Tcl manage Windows "shell links" [http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/shellcc/platform/Shell/Shortcut.asp]?
Certainly;
there are at least six ways:
   * [Matt Newman]'s tlink32 [http://www.sensus.org/tcl/index.htm]
   * 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 [http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/~steve/tcl/progman.tcl] package designed "package to allow creation of program groups and shortcuts in the start menu on Windows 9x/NT"                                                 
   * [Bill Schongar]'s WISE hack [http://groups.google.com/groups?q=schongar+shell32.lib+group%3Acomp.lang.tcl*&num=25&hl=en&safe=off&rnum=2&ic=1&selm=37418479%40News.Destek.net]
   * [freeWrap] includes "shell link" functionality comparable to tlink32's.
   * [[...]]
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[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]
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 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

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Related information appears in "[Windows specific Tcl commands]".
[Microsoft Windows and Tcl] - [Arts and crafts of Tcl-Tk programming]