Windows Explorer Command Line

Just because I’m that sad, I thought you might like a couple of handy ways to launch explorer so its where you want rather than drilling down to places.
Many people know the “Explorer X:\” trick that takes you to whatever you have as your X drive but have you noticed it doesn’t have the folders listed in the left hand pane? Useless!

Here’s a few that you might not know. Let’s start with solving the problem above:

Explorer /e, X:\
That’s open explorer, with the default view (i.e. showing folders) to the X drive

Explorer /e, X:\Work in Progress
Open my X drive, open the Work in Progress directory, showing folders in the left hand pane (interestingly, there’s no need for speech marks even though the path contains spaces)

You can do:
Explorer /root, \\server_name\share
To open that file share, however you could just type in the path to the run box instead and it should open correctly anyhow!!

There you go, sad but may come in handy one day (when making shortcuts for users or whatever). You never know.

Update: For more, have a look at Microsoft’s Site where it details additional things like opening Explorer with a particular file highlighted and stuff. Genius!

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