If you work on multiple computers, you probably use a USB drive to take your favorite portable software with you. Portable application suites like PortableApps.com, CodySafe, or Lupo PenSuite, each have a main menu providing access to the programs installed into the suite.

However, there may be reasons why you need to create shortcuts to programs on your USB drive. You may be using a program that does not integrate into the suite’s main menu. Or, you may not be using an official portable application suite at all, and just placing portable software in a folder on your USB drive. Maybe you prefer using shortcuts on the root of the USB drive, like a portable desktop.

Whatever your reason, you can’t just create a shortcut to an application on the USB drive and place it in the root of the drive. The shortcut will always refer to the full path of the application, including the drive letter. Different computers assign different drive letters to USB flash drives, so you would have to change the drive letter for your shortcuts when it changes. You can assign a static drive letter to the USB drive. However, if you would rather not do that, there is a way to create shortcuts to programs on a USB drive using relative paths.

Because Windows does not support relative paths in shortcuts, we will show you how to create a “shortcut” on the root of a USB drive by creating a batch (.bat) file and converting it to an executable (.exe) file.

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