Open Devices and printers window in batch?

Question

How do I open the Devices and printers tab in the control panel with batch or from the command prompt?

Niggardly

Answer 1

Take a look at the CLSID Key (GUID) listing.

With shell, you can execute code to open the control panel to the desired location.

explorer shell:::{CLSID key number below}

In this case, your code would be:

explorer shell:::{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}

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Alternatively:

Open Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound, left click and drag Devices and Printers to the desktop, this will create a new shortcut to that location.

With the shortcut, you can run it within a command prompt or a shell alternative.

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Both methods do the exact thing, opening the lnk in notepad reveals the location of:

{ 2 6 E E 0 6 6 8 - A 0 0 A - 4 4 D 7 - 9 3 7 1 - B E B 0 6 4 C 9 8 6 8 3 } \ 2 \ : : { A 8 A 9 1 A 6 6 - 3 A 7 D - 4 4 2 4 - 8 D 2 4 - 0 4 E 1 8 0 6 9 5 C 7 A }

Lilliamlillian

Does this work for different languages? One single shortcut and does it work for xp and 7? – Niggardly

Yes it works on Windows XP. This will work for any language that can communicate with shell. For example, PHP's shell_exec. – Lilliamlillian

If you want a more concrete approach (one that does not require a file to be created), you can check out the edit. – Lilliamlillian

Answer 2

Simple Run or CMD Command:

control printers

Waksman

Answer 3

A lot of the Control Panel apps in Windows that are using an Explorer UI can actually be launched quite easily as so:

control /name Microsoft.<name_of_app>

For example, you can do this:

control /name Microsoft.DevicesAndPrinter
control /name Microsoft.Display

Also, using rundll32.exe is another common way to open *.cpl apps. But that is a bit trickier and cryptic. Here's how you could open the Playback Devices view in the Sounds control panel:

rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL mmsys.cpl,,playback

Glennglenna