Any way to point the location of a folder to quotitselfquot?
I use portable programs a lot, and many of the portable applications that I use on my external hard drive point to another folder on the external hard drive (For instance, if I plug in my hard drive and it is assigned drive E, things downloaded by a portable application would store it in "E: Downloads." What happens if I use it on a computer that has another drive that already being assigned drive E?
Another scenario is if I copy the portable application folder from my external HDD to my desktop computer. If the application originally pointed to a download location within the folder of the application, can I have it so that it automatically knows to do the same (pointing the application to download to the folder the application is in) when it's on a different location (in this case my computer)?
I came across something called "symbolic links" and am not sure if it is related to my problem.
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@immortal192 Various combinations of dots and slashes will link in different ways.
If you use /Downloads as the target, it should link it as "[i]CurrentDriveLetter[/i]:/Downloads", putting the folder in the root directory of the drive, regardless of what drive letter is assigned.
The problem is it depends on how the application is written as to how it will interpret what you specify.
If the app uses standard Windows path specifications, then the standard relative linking should work.
If instead they take whatever you type as the download directory name and try to put it into a hard coded path, it may force you to specify the full path including a drive letter, or worse yet give some indeterminate outcome.
Thank you, worked for some of my applications, but unfortunately not the one that needed it most. Still, this is already very convenient for me and I learned something that I could put into good use.
Relative linking doesn't necessarily create a folder within the application and I was able to create the relative paths for subfolders (ex. New FolderNew Folder (2) that is outside of the portable app's folder and on the root of the drive). For Firefox, relative linking created a folder within /Firefox as your example pointed out (so I don't know how I could make the folder on the root of the drive instead, but I don't need relative linking for Firefox--this is just out of curiosity), so these are two different behaviors which is interesting.
@immortal192 I've never really had a need to explore all the intricacies of file-system addressing, but it appears what you need is called: "relative linking", and it should do what you were originally asking about.
Try setting the application's options to download into a folder called "downloads" with NO drive letter, path, slashes or dots.
That should force the app to use a folder RELATIVE to its own CURRENT drive and path specification.
Thus if the app is "Firefox" just set the Firefox download folder to "downloads".
Then if the drive currently has a letter of E:, downloads from Firefox should be pointed at:
E:/Firefox/downloads
If you move to a computer that gives the external drive a letter of G:, downloads from Firefox should be pointed at:
G:/Firefox/downloads, hopefully accomplishing what you're looking for.
The question is whether or not the individual applications in question will accept this form of directory addressing, and whether they'll actually use it when they store their output to the disk. The only way to tell for sure would be to try it.
Actually that's my solution for computers I use since I have a ton of external media storage and it would be hard to keep track as you guys have said. The problem is I use this external hard drive on public computers around the campus and no settings or anything is saved if I decide to use the same computer after I've logged out. If I were to only use that external hard drive, then it wouldn't be a problem since every computer I use there has 2 drives (C and D) so I can just have all my portable applications point to something in the E drive. However, I use this external hard drive on my laptop and computer as well, both of which already have E drives.
This is a very specific problem and in the end it's only a minor convenience (although I use over 20 portable apps which point to directories)--I just hoped symbolic links were a relevant and easy solution to my problem.
I use a similar solution to what MicroMyCrow suggested for my DVD drives because on different computers I have different numbers of hard drives so the optical drives would end up being given different letters by the system, making it harder to remember what letter they have on the different computers so I just assign them static letters of "Y:" and "Z: so they're all the same.
You could just assign your USB drive something like "U:" on all the computers you use, then all the applications could use "U"/downloads" without running into any problems.
As long as you keep the letter high up in the letter range it shouldn't conflict with any other drives.
Note that you'd have to do this on all the computers you expect to use the drive with.
I'm not sure there's a dynamic solution for the second scenario though. If the download directory is defined with a drive letter, I'm not sure you can make Windows dynamically re-define it. You could have all the applications use a download folder on the C: drive (which you can expect to exist on any computer you want to run the applications on), regardless of what folder or drive the actual application is stored on. That would solve the problem of moving the folder, at the cost of allocating space on C: for downloads.
Assign a static letter to the drive.
http://www.howtogeek.com/96298/assign-a-static-drive-letter-to-a-usb-drive-in-windows-7/?PageSpeed=noscript
If you know what you're doing, you can do it in the command line using diskpart.exe
it detects as another letter.bye