How can I get information about the items in the Recycle Bin?

For some reason, a lot of people are interested in programmatic access to the contents of the Recycle Bin. They never explain why they care, so it's possible that they are looking at their problem the wrong way.

For example, one reason for asking, "How do I purge an item from the Recycle Bin given a path?" is that some operation in their program results in the files going into the Recycle Bin and they want them to be deleted entirely. The correct solution is to clear the FOF_ALLOW­UNDO flag when deleting the items in the first place. Moving to the Recycle Bin and then purging is the wrong solution because your search-and-destroy mission may purge more items than just the ones your program put there.

The Recycle Bin is somewhat strange in that it can have multiple items with the same name. Create a text file called TEST.TXT on your desktop, then delete it into the Recycle Bin. Create another text file called TEST.TXT on your desktop, then delete it into the Recycle Bin. Now open your Recycle Bin. Hey look, you have two TEST.TXT files with the same path!

Now look at that original problem: Suppose the program, as part of some operation, moves the file TEST.TXT from the desktop to the Recycle Bin, and then the second half of the program goes into the Recycle Bin, finds TEST.TXT and purges it. Well, there are actually three copies of TEST.TXT in the Recycle Bin, and only one of them is the one you wanted to purge.

Okay, I got kind of sidetracked there. Back to the issue of getting information about the items in the Recycle Bin.

The Recycle Bin is a shell folder, and the way to enumerate the contents of a shell folder is to bind to it and enumerate its contents. The low-level interface to the shell namespace is via IShell­Folder. There is an easier-to-use medium-level interface based on IShell­Item, and there's a high-level interface based on Folder designed for scripting.

I'll start with the low-level interface. As usual, the program starts with a bunch of header files.

#include <windows.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <tchar.h>
#include <shlobj.h>
#include <shlwapi.h>
#include <propkey.h>

The Bind­To­Csidl function binds to a folder specified by a CSIDL. The modern way to do this is via KNOWN­FOLDER, but just to keep you old fogeys happy, I'm doing things the classic way since you refuse to upgrade from Windows XP. (We'll look at the modern way later.)

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