This is probably somewhat outside of the scope of a coding snack -- though it would make a terrific NANY application.
The idea is to make a commandline utility that can invoke one of the right-click file/folder context menu shell extensions on a file/folder.
That is, there are some programs / shell menu extensions that can only be accessed interactively from a file explorer tool. For example, right clicking on a file to upload an image to an online gallery, or selecting a file for a file comparison tool.
These shell extensions do expose their info via a dll in a predictable way to file explorers, so it should be possible to load them in a comandline utility and select one not by showing the user a menu but by using a commandline tool that specifies the target file and some pattern to match against the menu to select it.
Such a utility would let us batch execute such context menu extensions programatically, and invoke them from other programs.
The idea is to make a commandline utility that can invoke one of the right-click file/folder context menu shell extensions on a file/folder.
That is, there are some programs / shell menu extensions that can only be accessed interactively from a file explorer tool. For example, right clicking on a file to upload an image to an online gallery, or selecting a file for a file comparison tool.
These shell extensions do expose their info via a dll in a predictable way to file explorers, so it should be possible to load them in a comandline utility and select one not by showing the user a menu but by using a commandline tool that specifies the target file and some pattern to match against the menu to select it.
Such a utility would let us batch execute such context menu extensions programatically, and invoke them from other programs.
