Question

I have a “Show in folder” button which executes the following:

explorer.exe /select,"C:\dir\somefile.txt"

In Win7 this works great, a new window is always opened, but in XP, if “C:\dir” is already open, this window is reused but the selection is not changed to “somefile.txt”.

This is not the expected behaviour from the point of view of the user, he expects to see “somefile.txt”, but instead sees another file, and that might confuse him. At worst, he might assume that something went wrong and the file was not created.

So I need to somehow force Explorer in XP to always select the file I give it in the cmd line, or not to reuse the window.

Can anyone suggest a way to do this (different cmd parameters, maybe COM automation)?

Answer 1

As I don’t have Windows 7, I can’t confirm if this works the way you expect on subsequent Windows versions. But on my XP machine:

explorer.exe /e,/select,”C:\dir\somefile.txt”

Works exactly the way I think you’d want by opening a new explorer window each time with the right selection and avoids that confusing behavior you described.