Finding the Recycle Bin on a local NTFS drive

Question

I\'m trying to write some simple code that will return the directory for the recycle bin on a local drive. Seems like it would be simple -- should be a thousand answers on

Answer 1

A little bit late, but perhaps better late than never...

After debugging shell32.dll, I have found that for each version of windows the recycle path is hardcoded and, also, depends on the filesystem of that drive. I have tested this on Windows XP, Vista and Windows7:

Let X: be the drive we want to get the path to the recycle bin and let SID be the SID of the current user, then:

    switchif(OsType) {
        case WindowsXP:
        {
            if(PartitionType("X:") == NTFS)
            {
                printf("Path is: X:\\Recycler\\SID\\");
            }
            else
            {
                printf("Path is X:\\RECYCLED\\");
            }
        }

        case WindowsVista:
        case Windows7:
        {
            if(PartitionType("X:") == NTFS)
            {
                printf("Path is: X:\\$Recycle.bin\\SID\\");
            }
            else
            {
                printf("Path is X:\\$RECYCLE.BIN\\");
            }
        }
    }

A wiki article presents the same facts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycle_Bin_%28Windows%29