Ytdyklly

Everyday I have a new subfolder inside a Windows 10 directory.

I need to manually open the folder, and manually find the newest folder to store a file. There are already hundreds of subfolders.

I need to use a folder dialog from a program, which asks me to find the folder to store a file, so I cannot configure the folder dialog to sort by date, but I can use folder shortcuts.

Is it possible to make a shortcut to the newest subfolder of a directory in Windows 10?

You could make a Powershell script to do it. Use Get-ChildItem to find most recent folder and then WScript.shell to make a new shortcut.

For example :

# Default locations

$FolderRoot="D:Temp"

$Shortcut="D:TempLatest.lnk"



# Get latest folder in root folder

$Latest = Get-ChildItem $FolderRoot -dir | sort CreationTime | Select -last 1



# Delete old shortcut 

if (Test-Path $Shortcut){Remove-Item $Shortcut}



# Create new shortcut

$WshShell=New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell

$NewShortcut=$WshShell.CreateShortcut($Shortcut)

$NewShortcut.TargetPath = $Latest[0].FullName

$NewShortcut.Save()

If you save this as .ps1 file then you can run it daily and it will update the shortcut Latest.lnk to point to whatever the latest folder is.

Explorer and the Windows' file open dialog support sorting the folder as Creation time, no script is needed. Although it'll just sort by modified date by default, you can select Sort by > More and choose the appropriate item. Once set, explorer will remember the sorting option and then every time you open it the latest one will always be at the top, no script is needed

You can also create a symlink to the latest folder instead of a shortcut using cmd

rd newestDir

for /f "tokens=*" %%a in ('dir /b /a:d /t:c /od') do set newest=%%a

mklink /J pathtonewestDir "%newest%"

or powershell

$newest = Get-ChildItem "pathtoroot" -Directory | Sort-Object CreationTime | Select-Object -Last 1

New-Item -Path pathtonewestDir -ItemType SymbolicLink -Value "$newest" -Force

The above commands will create a symlink named pathtonewestDir that points to the latest folder

If you open the folder from shells you can open it directly from command line instead of creating a shortcut and update it every day

With powershell you need only one line

start $(Get-ChildItem "pathtoroot" -Directory | Sort-Object CreationTime | Select-Object -Last 1)

You can change the last part to Sort-Object CreationTime -Descending | Select-Object -First 1, or shorten it to

start $(ls "pathtoroot" -dir | sort CreationTime | select -last 1)

In cmd you can use this

for /f "tokens=*" %%a in ('dir /b /a:d /t:c /od') do set newest=%%a

start %newest%

Alternatively this also work

for /f "tokens=*" %%a in ('dir /b /a:d /t:c /o:-d') do (start "" "%%a" & exit /B)

exit /B can also be changed to goto :eof