How to expanding environmental variables?

[Austin English]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Nicolas Le Cam<niko.lecam at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

This may be the way to go, thanks!

-- 
-Austin