A Lightweight Alternative to Windows Shortcuts

Originally published on: Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:35:49 +0000

Some time ago, I needed to provide a desktop shortcut for an application. Rather than using the normal shell API's to create a shortcut on the Windows desktop, I wondered if I could make an EXE tiny enough so that it was almost the same size as a typical shortcut.

I used this pet project as an excuse to learn a little about the Netwide Assembler (NASM32). I opted to use some of the Visual C++ 5.0 runtime libraries and linker, so my NASM code probably looks different than most you'll see elsewhere.

I wrote a small program that simply calls WinExec passing in "notepad.exe" as the argument.

The resulting EXE is about 2K in size ... bigger than most of my shortcuts, but a worthwhile effort. I had rewritten this so that it would work properly with a separate linker and had gotten the EXE down to a very tiny size. Unfortunately, I no longer have that source.

To assemble and link this program, I used the following batch file:

Unless otherwise noted, all code and text entries are Copyright ©2009 by James K. Lawless

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