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How do we list out files in Recycle Bin (Windows 7)

In this post, I tried to enumerate files within recycle bin using a small Win32 program. As we know that recycle bin is a special folder on Windows File System. The location of this directory is not in the registry; it is marked with hidden and system attributes to prevent the user from moving or deleting it.

The steps to list out the contents of Recycle bin are as below:

1. It's a special folder denoted by CSIDL_BITBUCKET, which we need to pass to the function SHGetFolderLocation() method.

2. Source code snippet, I've avoided checks as much as possible to make the code simple and clean:

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    LPITEMIDLIST pidlWinRecycleFiles    = NULL;
    LPITEMIDLIST pidlItems                = NULL;
    IShellFolder *psfWinRecycleFiles    = NULL;
    IShellFolder *psfDeskTop            = NULL;
    LPENUMIDLIST ppenum                    = NULL;
    STRRET strDispName;
    TCHAR pszParseName[MAX_PATH];
    ULONG celtFetched;
    HRESULT hr;

    hr = SHGetFolderLocation(NULL, CSIDL_BITBUCKET, NULL, NULL, &pidlWinRecycleFiles);
    hr = SHGetDesktopFolder(&psfDeskTop);
    hr = psfDeskTop->BindToObject(pidlWinRecycleFiles, NULL, IID_IShellFolder, (LPVOID *) &psfWinRecycleFiles);
    hr = psfDeskTop->Release();
    hr = psfWinRecycleFiles->EnumObjects(NULL,SHCONTF_FOLDERS | SHCONTF_NONFOLDERS, &ppenum);

    while( hr = ppenum->Next(1,&pidlItems, &celtFetched) == S_OK && (celtFetched) == 1)
    {
        // Name of file and folder in recycle bin
        psfWinRecycleFiles->GetDisplayNameOf(pidlItems, SHGDN_INFOLDER, &strDispName);
        StrRetToBuf(&strDispName, pidlItems, pszParseName, MAX_PATH);

        // Path of file
        psfWinRecycleFiles->GetDisplayNameOf(pidlItems, SHGDN_NORMAL, &strDispName);
        StrRetToBuf(&strDispName, pidlItems, pszParseName, MAX_PATH);
        PathRemoveFileSpec(pszParseName);
        CoTaskMemFree(pidlItems);
    }

    ppenum->Release();
    CoTaskMemFree(pidlWinRecycleFiles);
    psfWinRecycleFiles->Release();

    return 0;
}

We need to include the library 'Shlwapi.lib'.


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