Search into folder shortcuts?

Question

In Windows Explorer, I've created a folder that contains a list of shortcuts to other folders. For example:

Is there any way to search for files and content in just those folders?

I was hoping to just use the Explorer search bar, but it doesn't seem to look into folder shortcuts.

Answer 1

You can use Library which includes links to your folders to search all folder links included in your library

Answer 2

Shortcuts are simply a normal file pointing to some item to open it so you can't recurse into them and search. You need to create a symlink or hardlink. For example if the folder you want to use for searching is C:\Searching then you can run this

mklink /j "C:\Searching\Util" "C:\Users\My\Util"

to create a symlink folder from C:\Users\My\Util to C:\Searching\Util

In PowerShell you can do like this

New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path "C:\Searching\logs" -Target "C:\Users\logs" # or
ni "C:\Searching\websites" -i SymbolicLink -ta "C:\My\websites" 

In both cases you need to run the console as administrator, or you'll have to enable developer mode

After that you can search freely in Explorer or in any command line tools because the folder appear just exactly as if they're in the new folder. Here's an example on my PC:

See also

• Creating hard and soft links using PowerShell
• How can I create a symbolic link on Windows 10?