For those of you like myself, who are prone to shooting ones self in ones foot, I offer the following script that might allow you to escape the consequences of ones capricious actions! In less flowery verbiage, I recently came up with the brilliant idea of improving my development situation by pruning my perl development tree from the main perl trunk. Surely a sensible thing to do (particularly since it shouldn't have been there in the first place) or at least so I thought until I noticed that all of my shortcuts (Windows .lnk files) no longer worked. So here is a short piece of code that bailed me out and that might help fellow travelers as well.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Fixlink.pl -- script to effect global change in link collection.
use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;
use Win32::Shortcut;

edit_lnkpath( $_, qr/$ARGV[1]/, $ARGV[2] ) for map { glob } $ARGV[0];

sub edit_lnkpath {
    my ( $file, $pat1, $pat2 ) = @_;
    my $lnk = new Win32::Shortcut($file)
      or die "Couldn't create shortcut object: $!";
    my $path = $lnk->{'Path'};
    if ( $path =~ /$pat1/ ) {
        print "'$path' changed to ";
        $path =~ s/$pat1/$pat2/;
        print "'$path'\n";
        $lnk->{'Path'} = $path;
        $lnk->Save();
    }
    $lnk->Close();
}
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