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CREATING A ROOTED EXPLORER SHORTCUT
Sometimes you might want to have a shortcut on
your desktop which is an Explorer view of one particular
directory on your hard drive, for example. Since I
download all my new programs from the BBS and the
Internet into a directory I call \NEW, I find it
convenient to have such a shortcut that allows me to
"explore" the directory NEW. The explorer view
is said to be "rooted" on the directory NEW.
I'll explain how I did this, and you could adapt the
procedure to any similar instance you might require.
First, I right-clicked on an empty space on my desktop
and chose the New and Shortcut options from the context
menu. Up pops the Create Shortcut wizard. I typed this
for the Command Line: "c:\windows\explorer.exe
/e,/root, c:\new". (You don't type in the quotation
marks, of course.) After clicking on the Next button, I
then named my shortcut "Explore \NEW", and then
clicked "Finish".
Now let's explain what the meaning of that
esoteric-looking command line is. The "/e" is a
parameter to EXPLORER.EXE that says to use the
"explorer view" rather than single-pane
"Open view". The "/root, c:\new" part
of the command line says that Explorer is to be
"rooted" in c:\new. That means that this
directory is the top level of the directory tree which
will be displayed. If you leave off the specification of
the directory (c:\new), then the view is rooted on the
Desktop folder. Incidentally, if you do leave off the
"c:\new" you must still have the trailing comma
that follows the word "root".