Fetch The Target

Windows delivers comfortable methods of managing your files, regardless of what you have in mind. Sure enough, some items might be more difficult to reach than others, such as shortcut targets. On the bright side of things, you can rely on specialized applications like Fetch The Target to retrieve a shortcut’s target.

A first thing you notice is that there’s no setup involved. This is because the application comes as a stand-alone tool, without binding itself to system registry entries. Moreover, this makes it possible to deploy it on a thumb drive in case you feel like you might need to use it on other computers as well.

Effort on your behalf is minimum, and the application quietly sits in the tray area during the operation. It automatically comes with the Win + C as the default hotkey, and you have the liberty to change it by accessing the settings panel from the tray menu.

When it comes to the hotkey it’s advisable to use something different than the Ctrl + C for a regular copy operation, because you might accidentally end up with various files and folders in an unexpected place. You can also rely on the default one, since it’s comfortable, and incredibly easy to remember.

What the application actually does is to retrieve the exact target of a shortcut of interest. The process is simple and intuitive. All of your effort narrows down to selecting one or more shortcuts and hit the hotkey command. Note that only the direct target is copied, and not the entire structure.

On the other hand, folders can be copied too if you perform this operation on a folder shortcut. On the bright side of things, the application only copies, and never removes anything. Cancelling an operation is done by closing the program while in action. Copied files remain there and the source is left intact.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that Fetch The Target is a reliable method of gathering the source of one or more shortcuts in a single place. Just make sure to use a free hotkey command when configuring, and to be careful what shortcuts you decide to use.