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In Vista/7, if I try to delete a shortcut using the following command -:

del "%allusersprofile%\Desktop\MyShortcut.lnk"

...Windows sees this folder as empty and doesn't delete the file.

The environment variable "allusersprofile" points to "C:\ProgramData" however "Desktop" is actually a soft symbolic link to the C:\Users\Public\Desktop folder.

The problem seems to be that these soft links are simply Window Explorer shortcuts and are not recognized by cmd prompts or batch files.

The only solution that I can see is to do the following -:

XP:

del "%allusersprofile%\Desktop\MyShortcut.lnk"

Vista/7:

del "%PUBLIC%\Desktop\MyShortcut.lnk"

Is there any common solution for both OSes?

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I'm not aware of any such way due to the file structure changes between XP and Vista/7. One way you could achieve this functionality in a script is to get the OS version using ver, run it through a series of if/else checks, and then use goto to run the appropriate command. – Garrett Nov 28 '11 at 5:02
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