ShortPATH

Create environment-wide shortcuts on Windows to run commands directly within the context of a chosen directory. Uses the PATH environment variable to add pipe commands that act as shortcuts to a directory of choice.

The executable is portable and requires no administrative privileges. Shortcuts are stored within the AppData directory to make them persistent.

Screenshot

Example

The etc shortcut is mapped to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

We can now run commands like this: etc <command> <arguments>.

Example output for etc dir:

C:\Users\Yani>etc dir

 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 1234-5678

 Directory of C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

23-May-18  05:10    <DIR>          .
23-May-18  05:10    <DIR>          ..
30-Dec-17  02:11             2,464 hosts
12-Apr-18  01:36             3,683 lmhosts.sam
16-Jul-16  13:45               407 networks
16-Jul-16  13:45             1,358 protocol
16-Jul-16  13:45            17,463 services
               5 File(s)         25,375 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  15,289,909,248 bytes free

How it works

The application is just a front-end for managing shortcut .bat files. When it's first ran, a directory in appdata is created and its path is added to the PATH environment variable.

Now when you run a command in your console, the new directory is checked for executable files. Because our shortcuts are saved as <shortcut>.bat, the shortcut acts as an executable and uses all other arguments as a new command in the directory the shortcut points to.

The shortcut file that is created looks like this:

@echo off
SET org_dir=%cd%
cd /d "<project-directory>"
%*
cd /d "%org_dir%\"

Download

https://github.com/yani/ShortPATH/releases

License

This software is licensed under the MIT license.