I'm just supposing and thinking about this here:
The utility I need may seem silly, but sometimes I have a file up - say, a Word doc - & I know it's been saved, because is has a title other than Document (#). But I'm not sure where I saved it! I want to be sure I can find it again before I feel I can close it. So I'd like a utility I could run that would tell me the complete path for that file. Please don't laugh - I know it's simplistic...
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-spectrekitty
I initially ignored this part of the OP as I felt that it was simplistic/infeasible, but after following this thread I belatedly realised that it seems to be based on a requirement that
I have often had under conditions and in a process where:
(a) it relates to a file that has already been saved at least once (but at an indeterminate date/time) by an (MS Office?) application;
(b) it relates to a file that is currently
open in said application and which might be about to be closed unchanged, or saved with some new changes;
(c)
the user requires feedback/confirmation as to where (path) the file that is about to be closed will be saved;
If the file has not been opened for some time, then it might
not be in the MRU list until
after it has been closed/saved. (Is that true?) That might be too late for the user's purposes.
Why would a user want to know the path at that point in time?One real-life example I could give as an answer here would be that I didn't want MS Office or other application to do it's usual thing and just close/save the document without telling me in some memorable way where it has put it, because, as we all know, MS Office and other applications often leave you with the subsequent need to know where the blasted document has been put so you can satisfy yourself that it is where you want it to be put.
Left to its own, the application will generally save the document in a default location (e.g., a special folder such as My Documents, or wherever it opened the file from).
What could be really useful to many users would be:
(i) to press a hotkey and be told immediately
where (destination path) that file will be closed/saved to by default when you close/save it;
(ii) to then be given an opportunity to
change that destination path, or add a new file Tag or something (i.e., take some action or other);
(iii) to then close/save and
move the file to a specific, required path (default or otherwise) accordingly.
This could imply some kind of memory-resident application that monitors application windows for certain types of file-closing activity and which communicates with the user (as above) appropriately, immediately and intuitively, prior to closing a file. It would probably be helpful if it maintained a pop-up history (log) of file paths that it had reported on.
To avoid developing a specialised app, there are some general purpose applications (I think "Beaumont" might have been one that I came across) which monitor certain folders and move files of specified types out of those folders and into a different one, when they detect a new file being closed in a watched folder. You could also consider using something such as (say) FreeFileSynce (RealTime sync module). The MS Labs Colletta project could be worth looking at for this also.