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I just noticed that I can open folders from the recycle bin without restoring them. I have the qttabbar extension that adds tabs to the standard windows explorer and I accidentally middle-clicked a folder.
It not only opened fine in a tab, but its contents behaved as if not deleted: proper open action and a full right-click menu.
That means all that's keeping users from opening files inside of recycle bin is that there's no menu action/open handler or whatever.
To be fair, notepad2 did choke on opening a file from a subfolder in recycle bin (bad path), although notepad++ handled the same file just fine. Thus this feature might not be for the faint of heart, but it would be extremely useful when crawling through heaps of garbage :)
Has anyone heard of such a hack/feature?
1If you go to
C:\$Recycle.Bin
with the "show hidden files" option checked and the "hide protected system files" unchecked, you will see a "Recycle bin" folder in there with the recycle bin item. You can open that folder and then copy-paste the title bar into an Open dialog of a program, then open the file from the program. Also, theoretically, you can open the files in there with cmd, but they all have coded names such as$R1PM1PT.JPG
which isn't visible in Windows Explorer that you need to know to open the file using cmd. – Donald Duck – 2018-04-09T15:49:33.7931Why exactly would you want to handle files in a bin... Or bin files you still need in the first place? – BloodPhilia – 2011-02-02T01:02:00.230
1Isn't that what the recycle bin is for? Restoring wrongly deleted items? What happens when there are more than one similarly or identically named files? – Raveren – 2011-02-02T01:24:08.043
3I can see the problem, you have tons of data folders in the recycle bin, possibly collected for years, and would like to sort through it before permanent deletion, restoring the folders would be a disaster, trying to keep track of where all that data was restored to, and then crawling all the directories to find it. – Moab – 2011-02-02T17:17:51.077
that's a severe extreme, but yes, stuff like that, you get the point. – Raveren – 2011-02-02T19:23:35.113