Problem creating a shorcut

[Duncan Booth]

Tim Golden <mail at timgolden.me.uk> wrote:

>> 3) You assume, that Firefox is always installed at C:\Program
>> Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
>> However the path largely differs from system to system. 
> 
> This is broadly true. However, it's fairly clear from the
> phrase "the user's desktop" that the OP is working in some
> kind of corporate environment where he can be fairly sure
> where Firefox is installed by policy. In addition, it's not so
> easy to find its path if it's not in the default place since apps 
> very rarely add their location to the system PATH these days 
> (and Firefox certainly doesn't). You could scan the registry for 
> its App Paths entry in the registry but I don't know if any other 
> way if it's not  the default browser (which it's clear from the 
> original post it  may not be).
> 

It's not too hard to get the required command line from the registry:

import _winreg
print _winreg.QueryValue(_winreg.HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT,
    'FirefoxURL\shell\open\command')

and of course it throws an exception if firefox isn't installed.

Then just replace %1 with the url to get the actual command you need.

-- 
Duncan Booth   http://kupuguy.blogspot.com