copying shortucts in dos

[CmptrGk]

ok, my former prealgebra teacher has a program called greenglobs, he happend to loose the install cd and asked me if i could write a program that would install the software for him. now i wrote 2 batch files one for windows 9x and the other for xp. but i cant get the batch file to copy shortcuts. is there anyway to do this, or is there a command in dos that will make 9x/xp happy and allow the shortcuts to work

[Mike Betts]

A "batch file" runs out of a DOS window. I think that the DOS copy command requires 8.3 filenames with no spaces or characters.

Try to rename a file like Eta Carinae's Future.lnk to something like etac_fut.lnk and see if that works.

[CmptrGk]

my only problem is that is not able to "find" GGLobs.lnk. am i doing something wrong here the command im using is
copy GGlobs.lnk "c:\documents and settings\all users\desktop"

nevermind i figured it out
the command was supposed to be
copy GGlobs.exe.lnk "c:\documents and settings\all users\desktop"

[Marc P.]

You would want to use the xcopy/xcopy32 command (for WinXP and Win98, respectively) in place of copy. When run within Windows, it will preserve long file names and attributes. You will have to find the original location of the Green Globs shortcut (on the desktop or start menu, and they will be in differant place within XP and 98). With XP you can use absolute pathnames in the batch file (such as C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Start Menu\Programs\Green Globs.lnk), while in 98 you have to use the condensed version (C:\WINDOWS\STARTM~1\Progra~1\Greeng~1.lnk). Am I correct in assuming you already have the program copied somewhere (CD or otherwise), and you wish to write a batch file to install/copy the files to the proper locations?

[CmptrGk]

acutally i have written everything and have gotten it to work, but i cant post it here becasue the program is licnesed to my former school and costs over $200

[Astronouth7303]

long file name support depends on what version you use. Generally, if you enclose the path in quotes, it will work. If you can't use the long file name, you can use the 8.3 alias (xxxxxx~#.EXT, where xxxxxx is the first 6 letters of the file name, # is an index (each file with the same 6 letters each have a progressively higher index), and EXT is the first 3 letters of the extension. So "Eta Carinae's Future.lnk" would become "ETACAR~1.LNK").
As mentioned before, shortcuts have the hidden extension of LNK.