how to create several shortcuts at the same time for all .exe files in a directory using powershell

Hi I want to create several shortcuts at same time using powershel and something like this

Get-ChildItem -Path D:\something\ -Include *.exe -File -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

get the results and generate shortcuts(.lnk files) for all .exe files

(.exe is just one example of file type)

Can u help me? thx

Solution

To create shortcuts of all your .exe files in a directory, you can do the following:

Create Windows Script host COM object to create shortcuts. You can have a look at Creating COM Objects with New-Object from MSDN for more information.
Get all .exe files in a directory. Similar to what you have done already with Get-ChildItem.
Iterate each of these files. Can use foreach or Foreach-Object here.
Extract BaseName from files. This means getting test from test.exe. We need this to make the shortcut file.
Create shortcut from path. This path is just the destination path + filename + .lnk extension. We can use Join-Path here to make this path.
Set target path of shortcut to the executable and save shortcut.

Demonstration:

$sourcePath = "C:\path\to\shortcuts"
$destinationPath = "C:\path\to\destination"

# Create COM Object for creating shortcuts
$wshShell = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell

# Get all .exe files from source directory
$exeFiles = Get-ChildItem -Path $sourcePath -Filter *.exe -Recurse

# Go through each file
foreach ($file in $exeFiles)
{
    # Get executable filename
    $basename = $file.BaseName

    # Create shortcut path to save to
    $shortcutPath = Join-Path -Path $destinationPath -ChildPath ($basename + ".lnk")

    # Create shortcut
    $shortcut = $wshShell.CreateShortcut($shortcutPath)

    # Set target path of shortcut to executable
    $shortcut.TargetPath = $file.FullName

    # Finally save the shortcut to the path
    $shortcut.Save()
}