How to follow a shortcut in powershell

Question

In powershell, you use cd dir to go into the directory dir.

But if dir is a shortcut to a directory, cd dir and cd dir.lnk both give an error, saying that the directory doesn't exist.

So how do I follow that shortcut?

(In Linux cd dir just works. In Windows, I've got no idea)

Answer 1

Using the shell com-object, you can get the target path and from there, do what you wish. Get-ShortcutTargetPath

function Get-ShortcutTargetPath($fileName) {
    $sh = New-Object -COM WScript.Shell
    $targetPath = $sh.CreateShortcut($fileName).TargetPath 
    [System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($sh) | Out-Null
    return $targetPath
}


$file = 'Path\to\Filename.lnk'
$TargetPath = Get-shortcutTargetPath($file)

if (Test-Path -PathType Leaf $TargetPath) {
    $TargetPath = Split-Path -Path $TargetPath
}

Set-Location $TargetPath

Answer 2

In Windows 10 cd directory_name or cd dir* if you only want part of the name assuming no other directories start with the same dir*.