I’m in the process of getting my new win10 system set up (pro/64) and I can’t get shortcuts-to-executables to work. One thing I’ve done [on many OS’s!] for a long time is use shortcuts [or symlinks, as appropriate :)] to executables. What I do, for example, is when I have “prog-v12.exe” I link to it from “prog.exe” and now the programs the use “prog” can do so without having to know which version I have installed [when prog-v13.exe appears, I just change the link and all of my programs work perfectly]. I have used this all over my win7 system.
My problem is that I can’t get it to work on win10. I have it set up, and when I double-click on the shortcut it runs the program just fine. But when I try to run it from a command prompt I get the “‘prog’ is not recognized as an internal…” error.
One thing I tried doing, but I think it is dangerous so I’m probably going to undo it, is to add “.lnk” to the PATHEXT environment variable and I was surprised that that partly works: I can now do “prog.exe” and it finds the link and runs the program, but “prog” still doesn’t work.
I’m tempted to try adding “.exe.lnk” to PATHEXT as see if that works, but that feels pretty wrong. If it does, and it is the only way, then I’d also end up adding “.bat.lnk” and “.pl.lnk” and …etc. Which I guess I could do, but surely there must be a simpler, more-elegant way to get this to work.
