How to expanding environmental variables?

[Nicolas Le Cam]

2009/7/18 Austin English <austinenglish at gmail.com>:
> Howdy all,
>
> I'm working on a automated test for Photoshop CS 2. As before, I'm
> trying to do so in a portable way, so it works on various
> locales/windows versions (or as much as possible). Because of
> wine/windows differences, I need a portable way to get to the shared
> documents folder, e.g.,:
> Windows XP:
> C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents
> WIndows Vista:
> C:\users\Public\Public Documents
> Wine:
> C:\users\Public\Documents
>
> Windows has several variables for this sort of thing
> (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms933062(WinEmbedded.5).aspx).
> In particular, I need a way to return what %16430% is on the target
> system. I've tried using cmd.exe to echo it, but it's not expanding
> it. Does anyone know how I can expand this type of variable? I figured
> there's probably something in shell32 that can accomplish this, but
> nothing popped up at me immediately (and I'm about to run, so I wanted
> to e-mail before I leave). Surely there's an easy way and I'm just
> overlooking it...
>
> Thanks!
> --
> -Austin
>
>
>
On a French XP SP3 explorer sees this folder as "C:\Documents and
Settings\All Users\Documents Partagés" but it points in fact to
"C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents", and under cmd only
the second one is accessible. On 2K there's no linking at all, it's
"C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents" on both sides.

If you have access to the registry, the full path of this folder is
contained (at least on 2K and XP) in the key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell
Folders\Common Documents

-- 
Nicolas Le Cam