How to Execute ShortCut From Command line in Windows 7

If you use double quotes around your "long file names.lnk" and you have appropriate privileges, it will execute. Quotes are needed when spaces exist in LFN's.

E.g. "C:\Users\Sunny\Start Menu\Programs\XBMC\xbmc.lnk" opens up XBMC. The same is true for the Run box Win+R "path and filename.lnk", Enter

START filename.lnk should do the trick

As long as there is no exe with the same name as the shortcut, you can omit the .lnk, so just START filename

The above solutions didn't work for me in 2017, so I experimented a bit.

It turns out that Windows (10 atleast) does make a distinction between shortcuts that link to a local path and shortcuts that are an url. What I found was that

• local paths use the suffix .lnk
• url-like paths have the suffix .url

So a shortcut to https://superuser.com/ would have the suffix .url while a shortcut to C:\Windows or to special locations like Control Panel would have the suffix .lnk.

If you want to execute the shortcut simply type shortcut.suffix in the cmd prompt where .suffix is the suffix according to the rule above. You must first cd to the folder containing your shortcut or enter the full path to the file. In your case

%userprofile%\Desktop\shortcut.suffix

entered into either the run dialog box (invoked via Win + R) or the cmd prompt would do the trick.

Windows and it's inconveniences.